a rs 


Shan i, a Se % ° hs & i : 
SAND fad . PA, 


‘ee, 
BEEK, 
eee 

earty 


pe eee 
Bhai Dusen RA 


Oy ice 
Ye 


oe oy 
be oat 
ge Bs 
P, 


bP ne AAS Saath Ae A t PG ae P ‘ : ; ; ‘ R 1 ah Sy 
* 7 FE - 2 ‘ z = ay . ao y, h A : te “ae . yet rd 
; * Al Tie ye C 4 ‘ g 4 PRM Boat Rach Deo 
= na Ady TB gr Be 
av Ste Be 
er ae 


al te ee nS 
ya f 


Sa bs se 








Library of Che Theological Seminary 


PRINCETON : NEW JERSEY 


C=): 


PRESENTED BY 


The Estate of the 
Reve John B. Wiedinger 


—— 


é 


it } 
QHes 


ot 


5 


ee. 
FN 























THE GOSPEL 
OF OUT OF DOORS 


v, 
FRANCIS E. CLARK 
President of the World’s Christian Endeavor Union 
Author of “Old Homes of New Americans,” “The 
Continent of Opportunity,” “In the Footsteps of 


St. Paul,” “The Holy Land of Asia Minor,”’ 
“Our Italian Fellow Citizens,’’ ete. 





ASSOCIATION PRESS 


New York: 347 Mapison Avgenug 
1920 


Acknowledgments are due, for permission to 
republish these chapters, to The Christian En- 
deavor World, The Outlook, The Continent, The 
Christian Herald, and Suburban Life. 


COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY 
Tue INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF YOUNG MEN’S 
CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATIONS 


To my grandchildren, 


ALDEN HasKELL CLarK, 
Ruto Emerson Cuase, 
Francis CLarK CHASE, 
Francis Epwarp CLaRK, 2nd, 
Marcery JACQUELINE CLARK, 
ELEANOR WILLISTON CHASE, 


for whom the Old Farm already holds so many 
out-of-door joys. May these joys increase as 
they and the farm grow older together. 





CHAPTER 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 
Wuy Tuis Book Was WRITTEN .... [| vii 
Tue Gospet oF Out oF Doors..... I 
Tue Joy oF THE SEED CATALOGUE.. 15 
Tue Lure oF THE OLD Faro ...... 21 
A Sermon To My BrotHer WEEDS 30 


FarmMinc as A Morat EQuIvVALENT 


ROL VVCARI uw ielat cate os iui tnyne tation 38 
UNDER THE WILLOW IN THE SPRING. 47 
My Doorstep VISITORS ........... 54 
Brrps IN THE BusH AND Brirps IN 

PH ELD OOK cy Barty roe RLU UNIS tors 62 
Out oF Doors IN THE AUTUMN... 69 
A Rainy Day aT THE FaRM........ 76 
THE UNDERGROUND ALCHEMIST.... 88 
FUN ON THE OLD FARM............ 95 
Atways SOMETHING NEW ON THE 

SOR DPE ARM juno aen iy ace ie array 105 
WExTSDESTATOOAN HARM oAls nent, 114 
(TAN FAVELORSEiLAUGH filettaieee esate) 122 


Ever-BEARERS AND EVER-BLOOMERS 136 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
, in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/gospelofoutofdoo0O0clar 


WHY THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN 


There are two kinds of books. One kind 
couldn’t be helped. The other kind could 
be helped, but their writers were compelled 
to write, by a sense of duty to a cause or 
an idea, or they were written with an eye 
to the royalties. Not that one kind is nec- 
essarily any better than the other. The 
author of the couldn’t-be-helped book may 
maunder on about his favorite subject as a 
lover babbles about his mistress, never quite 
happy unless he can find a sympathetic ear 
into which he can pour her charms. ‘The 
author of the could-be-helped book may bring 
to his tasks the research of a student and the 
industry of a lifetime, and produce a work 
that the world will not willingly let die. But 
I venture to say that the author of the 
couldn’t-be-helped book will enjoy himself 
more while he is at work on it, and will not 
quarrel with the world if his book doesn’t 
prove to be a “best seller.” 

I will confess without a blush that this 
book is of the latter class. I have come un- 
der the spell of the out of doors on the old 
farm. It would be hard not to write about it 


[ vii | 





WHY THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN 





even if nobody read what I wrote. Like an 
old minister whom I once knew, who, after 
he retired from active service, though he 
never expected to preach again, still wrote a 
sermon for his barrel every week, so I should 
be inclined, if worst came to worst, to write 
about my farm, even if my essays were to be 
forever confined to the unsympathetic em- 
brace of a drawer in my study desk. How- 
ever, a number of partial friends have ex- 
pressed their pleasure in some of these es- 
says, when published in various periodicals, 
and it requires but a slight amount of such en- 
couragement to incline one to bind the chil- 
dren of his love between boards and give 
them to the world. I have, too, a purpose 
not altogether egoistic in their publication, 
and that is that other men and women, en- 
couraged by my own experience of the joy, 
the comfort, and the health that come from 
an old Pat may feel its lure, learn its joy, 
and experience its health-giving comforts. 


Bob 


[ viii ] 


CHAPTER I 
THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


“Gospel,” in its derivation as well as in its 
modern meaning, simply means good news. 
This book was written to preach the Gospel 
of Out of Doors. If we really understand 
this gospel, every tree and shrub, every 
flower and fern, every star in the heavens 
and every fleecy cloud that veils them, will 
say to us, as Mt. Blanc shouted in the ears 
of Coleridge, “‘God, God, Gop.” 

This Gospel of Out of Doors is the most 
efficacious antidote for the peculiar evils of 
our own day and generation. ‘These are the 
evils of the city, not of the country. The 
reeking misery of the slums, not the stolid 
animalism of the fields, is our danger in 
America today. Anarchy is hatched in the 
city. The brothel is a product of the city. 
The ‘“‘gang”’ has no room for its operations 
except in the city. Bribery and political cor- 
ruption, “graft” of every sort, find their hot- 
bed in the city. If by some master stroke the 
slums could be transported to the Vermont 
hills or the Adirondack woods or the South 


[1] 





THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 





Dakota prairies, as Adam was put in the 
Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it, 
half the problems of our everyday civiliza- 
tion would be solved. 

If, at the same time with this removal of 
the submerged tenth, the equally submerged 
members of the Four Hundred at the other 
end of the social scale—the men and women 
submerged in the petty requirements of so- 
ciety, submerged in selfishness, in greed, and 
in indifference to their country, their political 
duties, and their fellowmen, submerged in 
depths of moral iniquity that so often cul- 
minates in the divorce court—if these men 
could also be planted in another garden and 
made to dress it and keep it, pretty nearly 
the other half of our national problems 
would be solved, “for then justice will spring 
out of the ground, and righteousness will 
look down from Heaven.” 

No nation was ever overthrown by its 
farmers. Chaldea and Egypt, Greece and 
Rome, grew rotten and ripe for destruction 
not in the fields, but in the narrow lanes and 
crowded city streets and in the palaces of 
their nobility. So let us thank God and take 
courage as we see in our day any movement, 
however halting, countryward; the ‘“‘aban- 
doned farm” no longer abandoned; the long 


[2] 





THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


and ceaseless line of hardy immigrants mov- 
ing northwestward to take up the yet unfur- 
rowed fields; the country homes made possi- 
ble by the bicycle and the automobile; the 
increasing interest in wholesome athletic 
sports; the fascination of nature study for 
our boys and girls; and the ‘‘call of the wild,” 
heard in these days from so many quarters 
and in such eager, imperative tones. 

Surely the history of the creation repeats 
itself in every generation, and constantly is 
the Lord God taking man and putting him in 
a new garden “‘to dress it and to keep it.” 
As the Psalmist called upon the dragons and 
all deeps, fire and hail, snow and vapor, 
stormy wind fulfilling His word, to praise the 
Lord from the earth, why may we not rever- 
ently call upon bicycle and automobile, steam 
train and trolley car fulfilling His word, to 
praise Him also, for these are His modern 
instruments for taking men out of the city 
streets and scattering them upon the face of 
the earth. 

Just as the slums were becoming more 
slummy, reeking more and more with the 
moral filth of the gutter; just as the com- 
mercial spirit seemed to be prostrating itself 
absolutely before the dollar sign, saying, 
‘We will have no gods before thee”; just as 


[3] 





THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 





our complex, artificial life seemed to be lord- 
ing it completely over the slower, simpler 
life of our fathers—in a single quarter cen- 
tury God called these new modes of locomo- 
tion into being and opened fresh fields and 
pastures new to jaded humanity, and at the 
same time created in our nation a hunger 
for the soil and a love for outdoors such as 
it had not known before. 

Why should not any lover of his kind call 
a motorcycle ‘‘a means of grace,” if its in- 
vention reveals God’s glories in nature to a 
million city-begrimed toilers? ‘The favored 
few cross continents or oceans to see a fa- 
mous picture or a lovely landscape, but here 
is a little affair with two wheels and some 
steering-gear that can show its owner a thou- 
sand beautiful nature pictures every year, 
and, while he is journeying to them, give him, 
at the same time, health and muscle and 
length of days. 

Whatever may be said against the athletics 
of the day—and a strong case can be made 
out against the brutality of some, the gam- 
bling spirit that goes with others, and the 
undue absorption of the American people 
in the sporting pages of the daily paper— 
this thought mitigates, if it does not cover, 
a multitude of their sins, that they are the 


[4] 





THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 





practical preachers of the Gospel of Out of 
Doors to a multitude who otherwise would 
know little about it. Few of these sports can 
be indulged in under cover; none but the most 
degrading and degraded are indigenous to 
city life. The acknowledged moral supe- 
riority of American students to those in many 
continental universities, which every traveler 
must admit, is due in no small part, I believe, 
to the rigorous training of the college navy 
and the football field, and the high physical 
standard demanded of the trained athlete. 
Over-indulgence, impurity, licentiousness, re- 
ceived a staggering blow among educated 
American men when the diamond was 
marked off, the running track laid out, and 
football goals were erected. 

But my subject is not one of abstract 
theory, it is not limited to the farmer or the 
athlete or to any particular class of favored 
mortals, for God’s air and sunlight are free 
to all. God’s pictures are painted on nature’s 
ever-varying canvas for everyone. It is only 
a matter of our looking. To every one who 
has legs to walk or a wheel to ride, and eyes 
to see, they are all free, for God never shuts 
up His best gifts in a gallery or makes them 
dependent on the size of a bank account. 


What, then, may the Gospel of Out of 
[5] 





THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


Doors do for each one of us? It may bring 
us back to the simple life which this feverish, 
artificial age so sadly lacks. ‘The least 
crumb of reality,” says Charles Wagner, ‘“‘an 
ant at work, a child at play, a leaf falling to 
the ground, has always strangely fascinated 
me. A part of the great human drama is 
played there, without paint or attitudinizing. 
The attraction of living things is inexhausti- 
ble. Each one of them by an irresistible 
movement becomes a sign, lesson, symbol. 
There is no rivulet, however small, that does 
not conduct to the sea. There is not a hidden 
pathway in the valley which, step by step, 
does not lead up to the height. The whole 
creation talks to him who knows how to lend 
an ear.” 

Especially is this out-of-doors outlook and 
uplook needed by the so-called educated man, 
whose learning smells altogether of the li- 
brary or the laboratory. ‘There is an intel- 
lectual exclusiveness which is only one shade 
less offensive to God and man alike than the 
snobbery of wealth, an educated Philistinism 
that is as ruthless in its prejudices and as nar- 
row in its outlook on life as the view of a 
Patagonian. Books, books, and what can be 
dug out of books, or put into books, is all of 
life to some. Such need to learn that 


[6] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


“One impulse from the vernal wood 
May teach you more of man, 
Of moral evil and of good, 
Than all the sages can.” 


Then there is a blessed freedom that 
comes only to the man out of doors, a liberty 
of spirit, an unswathing of the bands of con- 
vention and custom, an expansion of soul 
which is learned by those who know God in 
nature. 


‘Seas roll to waft me, 
Suns to light me rise, 
My footstool Earth, 
My canopy the skies,”’ 


sings Pope, or, as Wordsworth phrases it, 


“I care not, Fortune, what you may deny, 
You cannot rob me of free nature’s grace; 
You cannot shut the windows of the sky, 
Through which Aurora ‘shows her bright- 
ening face.” 


But if we would quote poetry, let us turn to 
the poetry of the Book of books, for the Gos- 
pel of Out of Doors is often interpreted by 
the Bible, and in turn largely helps us to un- 
derstand the Bible. When the Psalmist would 
declare the greatness of Jehovah, he takes us 


[7] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


out of doors with him, and bids us look up at 
the stars, and mark the fleet-winged chariot 
of the cloud, and listen to the voice of the 
wind. 


“OQ Jehovah my God, thou art very great; 
Thou art clothed with honor and majesty; 
Who coverest thyself with light as with a 
garment; 

Who stretchest out the heavens like a cur- 
tain; 

Who layeth the beams of his chambers in 
the waters; 

Who maketh the clouds his chariot; 

Who walketh upon the wings of the wind.” 


Then the thought of the singer turns 
from the mighty and terrible to the quiet 
and gentle out-of-door scenes, which tell him 
just as much of God: the gurgling, gurgling 
brook trickling down the hillside, the peace- 
ful cattle drinking at the stream, the birds 
singing in the trees. 


‘He sendeth forth springs into the valleys; 
They run among the mountains; 
They give drink to every beast of the field; 
The wild asses quench their thirst, 
By them the fowl of the heaven have their 
habitation; 
[8] 





THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 





They sing among the branches. . . . 
He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, 
And herb for the service of man.” 


But the winds and the thunder-cloud, and 
the quiet pastoral scenes, do not exhaust 
God’s goodness; “‘the sea is His, and He 
made it.” 


“Yonder is the sea, great and wide, 
Wherein are things creeping innumerable, 
Both small and great beasts. 

There go the ships; 

There is leviathan whom thou hast formed 
to play therein. 

These all wait for thee, 

That thou mayest give them their food in 
due season.” 


Was anything more exquisite ever penned 
than the Psalmist’s description of springtime 
and summer? 


‘Thou visitest the earth, and waterest it, 
Thou greatly enrichest it; the river of God 
ishtuotwaters «4 ne 
Thou makest it soft with showers; thou 
blessest the springing thereof. 
Thou crownest the year with thy goodness; 
And thy paths drop fatness. 


[9] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


They drop upon the pastures of the wilder- 
ness: 

And the hills are girded with joy. 

The pastures are clothed with flocks; 

The valleys are also covered over with 
corn; 

They shout for joy, they also sing.” 


We turn to that wonderful poem called 
the Book of Job, the book which Froude de- 
clared, when it was fully understood, would 
be seen towering up alone, above all the 
poetry of the world, and we hear Jehovah 
Himself rebuking the one-sided arguments 
of Eliphaz and the youthful presumptuous- 
ness of Elihu, as well as the despairing pes- 
simism of Job’s wail of anguish, by taking 
them all, as it were, out of doors, and show- 
ing them His invincible might in the heavens 
above, and the earth beneath, and the waters 
under the earth—a sight which calmed their 
nervousness and rebuked their littleness, and 
led Job to cry out in lowly reverence: ‘I 
have heard of Thee with the hearing of the 
ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee, where- 
fore I abhor myself and repent in dust and 
ashes.” 

And this is the way God brought the pa- 
triarch to Himself; not by argument, not by 


[10] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


philosophy, but by declaring His might and 
beauty in the invisible world: 


‘“Where wast thou when I laid the founda- 
tions of the earth? 
Declare, if thou hast understanding. 
Who determined the measures thereof, if 
thou knowest? 
Or who stretched the line upon it? 
Whereupon were the foundations thereof 
fastened ? 
Or who laid the corner stone thereof; 
When the morning stars sang together, 
And all the sons of God shouted for 
JOY ceesraals 
ae thou bind the cluster of the Pleiades, 
Or loose the bands of Orion? 
Canst thou lead forth the signs of the Zo- 
diac! in their season? 
Or canst thou guide the Bear with her 
fraine. 


When Isaiah, stern prophet of retribution 
as he is, tells of God’s goodness to a repent- 
ant people, he must go out of doors to find 
his smiles. It is inthe mountains and the hills, 
in the fir trees and the myrtles, that he finds 
the symbol of God’s everlasting loving- 
kindness. 





1 Margin. 


[11] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


‘For the mountains may depart, 

And the hills be removed; 

But my lovingkindness shall not depart 
from thee, 

Neither shall my covenant of peace be re- 
moved.” 


‘For ye shall go out with joy, 
And be led forth with peace: 
The mountains and the hills shall break 
forth before you into singing, 
And all the trees of the field shall clap their 
hands. 
Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir 


CECE: 

And instead of the brier shall come up the 
myrtle tree: 

And it shall be to Jehovah for a name, 

For a everlasting sign that shall not be cut 
O ee 


But not only David and Job and Isaiah, 
but He who spake as never man spake, takes 
us into the open with Him. His greatest ser- 
mon was preached from the pulpit of a rough 
hillside while His audience sat upon the 
grass. He stood in the stern of a little boat, 
tossing upon the gentle waves, while His 
hearers lined the shore. He told them of the 
lilies, one of which He could perhaps pluck 
as He spoke, and hold before them. He 


[12] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


talked of the birds, which perhaps sang to 
the people while He talked about them. The 
mustard seed is not too small, and the moun- 
tain which might be removed and cast into 
the sea is not too large, to illustrate His les- 
son of faith. He went fishing with His dis- 
ciples, and spent His nights of prayer not in 
an oratory, but on the mountain side. 

Then, as we close, let us come back, led 
by our Lord’s gentle hand, to our thought at 
the beginning that the good tidings of out- 
doors, like every other gospel, is to bring us 
to God the Father in this great world—our 
Father’s house. 

Nature hath many voices, but one theme. 
Many instruments are in her orchestra, but 
they are all tuned to the same key. They all 
tell of His infinite might and majesty and 
power. Let us then, as we walk abroad, 
think of hills and valleys, not alone as agri- 
cultural possibilities; of leaf and tree not 
only from the forester’s standpoint; of purl- 
ing brook in summer or icy lake in winter 
not simply as places for sport, but of each 
as a messenger to lead our spirit upward and 
onward. 


‘Oh what a glory doth the world put on, 
For him who with a fervent heart goes forth 


[13] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


Under the bright and glorious sky, and 
looks 

On duties well performed and days well 
spent ! 

For him the wind, ay, and the yellow leaves, 

Shall have a voice, and give him eloquent 
teachings.” 


Indeed, these eloquent teachings will not 
narrow or dwarf our souls by telling us of 
anything sordid and mean and selfish, but 
they will speak of duty and privilege, of love 
and hope, of right and wrong, of man and 
God, and with Browning we can cry: 


‘I trust in nature for the stable laws 

Of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant, 
And Autumn garner to the end of time: 

I trust in God—the right shall be the right, 
And other than the wrong while he en- 

dures: 

I trust in my own soul, that can perceive 
The outward and the inward, nature’s 


good and God’s.”’ 


[14] 


CHAPTER II 
THE JOY OF THE SEED CATALOGUE 


They began to come a month ago, these 
delicious bits of good literature—sweet har- 
bingers of spring. As I write, the blizzard 
of the winter is howling around my north 
windows; the snow lies a foot deep on the 
piazza and the lawn—even the hardy blue 
jay no longer scolds his mate from the big 
pine tree at the back door, but is trying to 
find scant shelter from the Arctic winds in 
the thicker woods. Yet even my sympathy 
for him and other two-legged tramps cannot 
altogether dull my joy, for a bright fire is 
blazing upon the hearth—and the seed cata- 
logues have come. I have been saving them 
up for a month for just such a cozy, indoor 
afternoon as this, that I might gloat over 
them, and conjure up pictures of greenery 
and bloom which, without them, would seem 
so far away. 

Shall I begin at the vegetable or the flower 
end of my catalogues? I think with the for- 
mer, for they deserve the place of honor by 
the good old rule that “handsome is as 


[15] 





THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 





handsome does.”’ I will begin, too, at the 
very beginning. I will not even skip the title 
page or the preface, lest I might miss that 
new squash that is put upon the market for 
the first time this year. 

“© squash rich and mellow, with insides 
of yellow,” as the seed catalogue poet rhap- 
sodizes, ‘‘just list while I sing a few lines; 
product that’s greater, from beet to potater, 
ne’er grew on a husbandman’s vines! A 
Hubbard squash dinner is always a winner, 
a solace, a balm and a boon; it cheers and re- 
freshes, and breaks up the meshes of sorrow 
at noon. Who was it invented the large, 
pleasant-scented and life-saving squash we 
adore? Let’s crown him with laurel and bay 
leaves and sorrel, and honor his name ever- 
more!’ 

But the poet’s eulogy of the squash shall 
not cause me to forget the humble snap bean 
and the prosaic beet, and I read with abso- 
lute conviction that the “‘mammoth bean pods 
are eight or ten inches long, as thick as our 
finger, very fleshy and thick meated, while 
the color is a rich golden yellow, very clear 
and waxlike.’’ I further read that the beets 
are “smooth and round, exceedingly sweet 
and tender, and never coarse, tough, or 
stringy.” To be sure, I am a trifle staggered 


[16] 


THE JOY OF THE SEED CATALOGUE 


by reflecting that there are ten kinds of beans 
and eight kinds of beets, each of which is, 
apparently, a little better than all the others. 
But I reflect that these vegetables are un- 
doubtedly like the headgear the rival hatters 
presented to President Lincoln, and of which 
he said, “Gentlemen, your hats mutually 
surpass each other.’ I have no doubt that if 
I had all the ten kinds of beans and the eight 
kinds of beets on the table before me, I would 
use as many superlatives as the seed cata- 
logue man himself. How can one write se- 
dately, or remember “‘the power of an undue 
statement,” when he is writing on such sub- 
jects as fresh beets and string beans? 

I read on and rejoice in the prospects of 
‘cucumbers of enormous size, great beauty, 
perfect shape, and rich dark green color, 
the flesh compact, fine-grained, spark- 
ling white, and of a most refreshing 
and delightful flavor,’ of lettuce that 
‘almost melts in the mouth, crisp, ten- 
dene sweet, and: white; of’ +a’ potato 
that is “particularly mild and delicious,” 
and of a tomato of which it is said, “‘when 
once grown, all others are discarded.”’ Now 
come the pages devoted to corn. Can you 
not see the tall, stately stalks with the ears, 
‘three on every stalk,” peeping out from be- 


[17] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


neath the broadswords of leaves? And as 
your imagination runs riot in the cornfield 
of next August you feel that the seed cata- 
logue man has scarcely done justice to the 
subject when he writes of the ‘‘deep, succu- 
lent kernels, of a rich, translucent, cream- 
yellow color, tender, deliciously melting, and 
sweet.” And the melons, both musk and 
water—what dictionary contains adjectives 
enough to describe them fairly and fully? 
The catalogue man has evidently fallen down 
woefully, when he can only speak of a musk- 
melon as “‘spicy in flavor, the meat thick, fine- 
grained, and very rich,” or of a watermelon, 
‘no matter what we say, its delicious quality 
and sugary sweetness will astonish you when 
you eat it.” That last sentence shows how 
tired he is, how adjectives pall, and descrip- 
tions utterly fail to describe. So I will turn 
to the flower end of the catalogue, on the 
principle that the boy saves the sweetest 
cooky for the end of the meal. 

Just look at them, these wonderful morn- 
ing glories of a thousand shades, covering 
the whole side of a house, and sweet peas as 
big as dahlias, and twice as fragrant. They 
even seem to give their delicate odor to the 
printer’s ink which pictures them. And the 
monster carnations! Let your imagination 


[18] 


THE JOY OF THE SEED CATALOGUE 


run riot on the golden carnation, ‘with its 
exquisite fragrance, petals deeply serrated, 
and color dark yellow, with a few faint 
marks of pink’! See the soldier-like holly- 
hocks standing up stiffly beside the old farm- 
house in their many-colored uniforms, and 
the peony bed arrayed in such colors as 
Queen Cleopatra or Joseph in his variegated 
coat never aspired to! View in imagination, 
stimulated by the seed catalogue, the modest, 
brown-coated mignonette, making no bid for 
popularity, except to the nostrils, but its re- 
membrance lingering there, when its more 
gaudy companions are forgotten. ‘Think of 
the roses rambling over the porch, or climb- 
ing over the garden wall, and filling the 
whole landscape with their exquisite beauty, 
and the wistaria dropping its long and lovely 
fronds, while it says to you, ‘‘Can you find 
anything more perfect and graceful than my 
purple clusters ?”’ 

I glance out of the window again after 
an hour with my seed catalogues. Can it be 
that it is still snowing, that the ground is 
still white, and all the trees bare, except 
where a few brown birch leaves still cling 
to the young trees, until the spring buds 
shall push them off? Well, perhaps it is 
winter, yet I have but to turn from the win- 


[19] 





THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 





dow and take up my catalogues again, to see 
the vegetables in my garden waiting to be 
picked, and the roses climbing over the wall, 
and the hollyhocks standing in soldierly rows 
behind the house, and the sweet peas breath- 
ing out their fragrance over all. Thanks 
for your catalogues, O seedmen; I will sit 
down this very afternoon and send you my 
first order for the new year of fruits and 
flowers. 


[20] 


CHAPTER III 
THE LURE OF THE OLD FARM 


“Christianity is not like butter,” said a 
Christian Chinese to his Confucian neigh- 
bors who had come to hear about his new re- 
ligion, “‘you don’t have to learn to like it.” 
So is the love of the land with most normal 
people. Tobacco is an acquired habit—you 
have to learn to like it, as a Chinese has to 
learn to like butter. Raw oysters and olives 
usually have to be practiced upon by most 
people before they can swallow them without 
a grimace, but land hunger is as universal as 
the liking for strawberries and cream. ‘To 
be sure, there is here and there an abnormal 
person who is poisoned by strawberries, and 
whose stomach rebels at cream, but they are 
what a politician, when talking of the third 
or fourth party, calls a ‘negligible quantity.” 

Love of the land is substantially universal. 
Revolutions have been fanned into flame by 
land hunger, continents have been peopled 
by the same appetite. “‘Pike’s Peak or Bust,” 
was the motto of the land-hungry pilots of 
the prairie schooner in the forties and fifties. 


[21] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 





The Bolsheviki of Russia acquired their great 
following by appealing to this universal in- 
stinct, and even the rock-ribbed Tories of 
England see the handwriting on the wall, 
and know that some time their great estates 
must be divided, or at least reduced in size, 
to give “honest John Tompkins, the hedger 
and ditcher”’ a piece of the earth that he may 
call his own. The writer of the famous 
couplet, who told us that honest John, 
‘‘though he always was poor, never wished 
to be richer,” was fooling himself and the 
people for whom and to whom he wrote. 
Honest John across the seas, though he may 
not have sighed for the wealth of the In- 
dies, always did and always will want a piece 
of old England. Then why thwart a prime- 
val instinct, when most of you who read this 
book can gratify it by a little self-sacrifice 
and forethought? 

To be sure, the lure of the farm is not al- 
ways felt in early life, especially if one is 
born on a farm. ‘To be strictly honest, I 
must admit that many boys are lured away 
from the farm by their early experiences. 
The glare of the city streets dazzles their 
eyes, the movie shows and the bustle and 
excitement of town life make the old farm 
seem tame and lonesome, and many a good 


[22] 


THE LURE OF THE OLD FARM 


farmer has thus been spoiled to make a 
fourth-class counter-jumper. But Nature 
has her revenges, as well as her compensa- 
tions, and this same boy, when twenty or 
thirty years have added discretion to his en- 
terprise, and cooled his impatient blood, is 
likely to sigh, ‘Oh, that I had a piece of solid 
land and an old farmhouse that I could call 
my own, instead of a sixth-floor back apart- 
ment, and a view of the chimney-pot of my 
next neighbors !”’ 

No, the lure of the farm is not likely to 
be an experience of hot-blooded youth. We 
are told that the cripple at the Beautiful 
Gate of the temple whom Peter healed was 
in middle life. In the words of Scripture, 
‘The man was more than forty years old on 
whom this miracle of healing was wrought.” 
I think that is about the age on which this 
other miracle of healing is usually wrought, 
and that then the farm begins to call one 
back to generous Mother Earth from which 
he sprang. Then most men begin to be 
healed of the blindness which in early life 
prevented them from seeing the beauty of the 
opening bud, the delicacy of the first catkin, 
and the peculiar lusciousness of the first 
peach from one’s own orchard. ‘Then one be- 
gins to learn that the most delicious “‘Deli- 


[23] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


cious’ apple from the Yakima Valley cannot 
compare in flavor with the old-fashioned 
Baldwin from the tree which he himself has 
planted, tended, trimmed, sprayed, and 
guarded from the ravages of gypsy moth and 
codling moth and scale and borer. Then he 
finds that the lowly violet on his own farm, 
or the lady’s-slipper which springs uncared 
for among his own pine needles, is dearer to 
him than a whole shopful of floral beauties. 
There is no doubt about it—Mother Earth 
calls her children with many voices. ‘The 
frogs and froglets in the early spring when 
the ice goes out of the ponds, the wild geese 
winging their way north, the bluebirds and 
robins in their love-making, the rustle of the 
new-born leaves on the poplar trees, the bay 
of the hound, the whinny of the horse scent- 
ing the oats, the lowing of the mother cow 
anxious about her absent calf—yes, even the 
satisfied grunt of the pig at the trough—are 
calls to the old farm that are hard to resist. 
There are still subtler lures than these that 
Mother Earth uses in calling her children 
back to her bosom. The scent of the soil 
newly turned by the plowshare, the sight of 
the first spear of corn peering above the 
brown soil, the howling of a spring gale 
around the northeast windows, the crackling 


[24] 





THE LURE OF THE OLD FARM 


of the birch logs in the big fireplace—these 
are all sights and sounds which you can find 
to perfection nowhere else except upon the 
old farm. 

From forty to fifty or sixty the lure of the 
farm grows stronger with each passing year, 
but I would not advise the man on whom the 
miracle of healing begins to be wrought to 
put off all action much beyond his fourth dec- 
ade—the uncertainties of life are too grave, 
and he may lose altogether, not only the joy 
of the farm, but the joy of farm-hunting, if 
he feels himself too rich in time and squan- 
ders his patrimony of days and months. 
Yet let not the man who is beginning to get 
his eyes open and who sees trees as men 
walking, go at his quest too rashly or hur- 
riedly. He will lose part of the pleasure that 
should be coming to him, if he does not spend 
two or three years in farm-hunting. Isaak 
Walton tells us that we should treat the 
worm upon our hook as though we loved it; 
so the business of farm-hunting should be 
gone about deliberately and lovingly, lest we 
find at last that we have caught the wrong 
fish. 

To be sure, the man with ancestral acres 
or the one who knows of an old family home- 
stead, which he is bound to buy back, is de- 


[25] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


prived of the pleasure of farm-hunting, for 
there is only one farm for him, however near 
the North Pole or the Everglades of Florida 
it may lie. But most of us can enjoy the de- 
lights of farm-hunting until the place is dis- 
covered that comes the nearest possible to 
fitting our tastes and our pocketbooks. We 
will first consult the advertising columns of 
some farm agency. What a bewildering lot 
of ‘‘snaps” there are—fertile acres, fruitful 
orchards, a wood lot from which in imagina- 
tion we have already cut the logs that glow 
and sparkle in our big fireplace of a winter’s 
evening, ‘‘a cosy little five acres just right for 
a hen farm,” another one bordering a fresh- 
water pond full of fish. Who could not be 
satisfied, especially when the prices range 
from $500 to $50,000? Every taste and 
every purse surely can be fitted to a T. 

My own requirements were a little farm 
but a diversified one, of upland and valley, 
within sight of the sea, and within hearing 
of the roaring of the waves, plenty of old 
apple trees in whose hollow trunks the 
yellow-hammers might make their nests—I 
would not let a tree surgeon plaster them up 
for any money—some land where I might 
plant a young orchard according to my taste, 
a sufhcient amount of woodland to keep the 


[26] 


THE LURE OF THE OLD FARM 


home fires burning, not too much arable 
land—not more than enough for one hired 
man to cultivate—a chance of course to keep 
a cow, a pig, and some hens, to say nothing of 
dogs and cats, and an old house with plenty 
of fireplaces, and preferably with a ghost. 
Together with a good lady whose farm- 
hunger, though it sometimes had to be stimu- 
lated, measurably kept up with my own, I 
sought the ideal farm. We had no end of 
fun reading the advertisements and allow- 
ing our fancies to paint them in still more 
glowing colors, though that was unnecessary, 
and occasionally we took an excursion into 
the country to look at .a promising prospect, 
only to have our hopes shattered, though we 
got more than enough fun out of it to pay 
for our carfares and our time. 

Some ten years we hunted for our ideal— 
our ideal, not yours, my reader, for it would 
be as unfortunate if we all wanted the same 
farm, as if all men wanted to wed the same 
woman—and at last we found it. Yes, we 
found exactly the one that had been aban- 
doned for us. It was within sight and sound 
of the sea. It was small but marvelously 
diversified for its few acres. It had plenty 
of old apple-trees and a chance for young 
ones. It had wood enough to last, with ju- 


[27] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


dicious cutting, for fifty years. It had room 
enough for a small menagerie of animals. It 
had a farmhouse more than two hundred 
years old and incredibly dilapidated, but 
with five fireplaces, and possibilities of re- 
pair—yes, and it had a ghost. It was such 
an utterly abandoned old farm that no one 
in the vicinity wanted to try to reform it, 
but this was an advantage, for it came within 
the compass of my lean pocket-book. 

Now, Brother Man, go thou and do like- 
wise. Begin your hunt when you are forty, 
if you have not yet reached the end of life’s 
first semester. If you have, lose no time, and 
before you are fifty you, too, believe me, 
will find your ideal, unless you are intolerably 
‘difficult,’ as the New England housewife 
would call you. Remember this, too, Brother 
Man—the time is coming when you should 
not let your business drive you 


“Like a galley slave at night 
Scourged to his dungeon,”’ 


when your people will want a younger min- 
ister, your clients a younger lawyer. Then, 
if you have yielded to the lure of the farm, 
have diligently and successfully hunted and 
captured the right one, you will have some- 


[23] 


THE LURE OF THE OLD FARM 


thing to interest you all the rest of your 
days. You will not die before your time, of 
inanition or ennui, as so many men have done 
when advancing years compel them to drop 
their old interests, but your last days will be 
your best days, and you will be gathered to 
your fathers like one of your own shocks 
of corn, fully ripe. 


[29] 


CHAPTER IV 


A SERMON TO MY BROTHER 
WEEDS 


If I had been St. Francis, I would cer- 
tainly have addressed a sermon to the weeds. 
It was all very well for him to preach to 
the birds, especially since all the pictures 
show how attentive were his feathered breth- 
ren. Nor do I wonder that St. Anthony ex- 
horted his brother fishes, because the people 
of Rimini would not listen to him. It must 
be so, for they have commemorated the fact 
by building a chapel, which I have seen, on 
the banks of a canal near the Rubicon, to 
the preacher and his “Brother Fish.”” There 
have been many fishermen preachers, but 
only one preacher to fish, and he surely de- 
serves his piscine chapel. Many preachers 
doubtless have wished that they had even 
fish to turn to, from an unresponsive au- 
dience. But in none of their voluminous 
biographies have I read that either of these 
saints preached to the weeds, as I am often 
tempted to, since I feel that my kinship with 
them is so close. 


[30] 


A SERMON TO MY BROTHER WEEDS 


If a preacher can exhort effectively only 
those whose tendencies and temptations he 
has himself known, most of us are particu- 
larly well qualified to address our brother 
weeds. Itis a wise homiletical rule to preach 
ad hominem, and to let your auditors know 
that you sympathize with them and under- 
stand their peculiarities. 

My sermon to weeds would be something 
as follows: 

Beloved brethren, we, your fellow-mor- 
tals, have much in common with you. In 
the morning we flourish and grow up; in the 
evening we are cut down and wither. Our 
brief day is but a little longer than yours. 
Indeed, it may be shorter; for some of you, 
I note, are perennials, and very loath to die, 
while our days are numbered from the be- 
ginning. I notice, too, that most of you are 
very persistently bent on taking the wrong 
course, and in this respect, too, we acknowl- 
edge our kinship. 

Brother Burdock, you have long and ex- 
ceedingly tough roots. I sometimes think 
they are clinched on the other side of the 
globe. You are much inclined to spring up 
in our lawns where you are not wanted. 
Alas! our own evil propensities are just as 
deep-rooted; and when we think we have 


[31] 





THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 





cut off the evil thing, and believe that it will 
trouble us no more, we soon find that we 
have but clipped the top of our passions, and 
that their roots stretch down into the depths 
of our being. 

Brother Pursley, you, too, have the same 
faults, and I find you among my peas and in 
my strawberry bed, where your room is far 
better than your company. But how can we 
reproach you for persistently crowding out 
your betters when we find that with our own 
best thoughts and actions evil is mixed! Into 
our prayers even sometimes wandering 
thoughts intrude. I fear that some of us 
gave an extra five dollars to the hospital 
because, though it was more than we could 
afford, our name had to appear on a sub- 
scription paper next to that of a richer 
neighbor, and we could not drop our offering 
into the anonymous seclusion of a contribu- 
tion-box. 

And you, too, Brother Poison Ivy, even 
with you we must claim kinship, however 
unwillingly. Like many a bad habit, you are 
quite bewitchingly beautiful in your early 
days. In the spring you put forth your three 
finely veined and tinted leaves, and twine 
lovingly about any support you may find. If 
you find none, you stand upright and inde- 


[32] 





A SERMON TO MY BROTHER WEEDS 





pendent. But how you do multiply your- 
self, sending out far-reaching roots, stretch- 
ing in every direction, until the ground is a 
perfect network of your fibers! You 
strangle every delicate thing to which you 
attach yourself, and poison some people 
who do but breathe the same atmosphere. 

Many of us know your prototype too well. 
Those little bad habits, begun when we were 
boys—what a lot of trouble they gave us 
before they were rooted out! We are not 
sure that their virus is dead yet. he harm- 
less, pretty little thing at the beginning— 
mere good fellowship, harmless conviviality, 
it seemed, but it strangled a life and poisoned 
a whole family when it was grown. More- 
Over, you sow your evil seeds at the same 
time that you stretch your runners under- 
ground, until you have a million children 
and many square rods of my farm are cov- 
ered with your noxious growth. I cannot 
deny it. The sins of us mortals multiply in 
very much the same way. One leads to an- 
other and another and another, until the 
good soil of human nature that was meant 
to grow virtues and good deeds is often pre- 
occupied with a rank and poisonous moral 
vegetation. 

Brother Witch Grass, I must not forget 


[33] 





THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


to reprobate you. How innocent you look 
when your first green shoot appears above 
the brown soil of springtime! You would 
deceive the very elect, for you look exactly 
like your succulent brother, Herd’s Grass, 
but, if we let you grow, your tangle of roots 
and worthless shoots will choke every decent 
plant in the neighborhood. 

There are others of your tribe which give 
me a lot of trouble, and yet I do not like to 
class them with Brother Poison Ivy and 
Brother Burdock and Brother Witch Grass. 
I refer to you, Brothers Daisy and Butter- 
cup and Dandelion. You are very pretty 
and not without your uses, | admit. You 
brighten a field, and are quite as exquisite 
in your way as many of the flowers we cul- 
tivate and’cherish. But you have the vice of 
overdoing your virtues and obtruding them 
where they are not wanted. 

You, Brother Daisy, get into the mowing- 
grass, and then you become a Whiteweed, 
and we farmers have little patience with you. 
You, Brother Buttercup, do the same thing, 
and spoil next winter’s fodder; and as for 
you, Brother Dandelion, you are the pest of 
our lawns. Yet we cannot reproach you too se- 
verely, when we remember how our own vir- 
tues tend tovices. We think they are “‘daisies,”’ 


[34] 





A SERMON TO MY BROTHER WEEDS 


and so they are; but they sometimes get so 
rampant as to choke out other and more im- 
portant virtues. [hey lead us to the sins 
to which we have no mind. Often they get 
into our neighbor’s fields, and they hide all 
his special merits, so that we cannot see 
them ourselves, while we become a nuisance 
to him and he wishes we were farther away. 
Neatness is most admirable, yet a good 
wife’s fear of a speck of dirt on the kitchen 
floor often makes the men-folks uncomfort- 
able. Self-sacrifice is one of man’s noblest 
virtues; but when it develops into a self- 
imposed, lifelong martyrdom, it is worse 
than buttercups in the mowing patch. Ex- 
ecutive ability is indispensable in its place; 
but when it undertakes to regulate every 
one’s actions, it is as much out of place as 
a crop of dandelions on the front lawn. 
There are other brothers, which I think 
must be classed as weeds, though they can be 
used in times of famine. Brother Sorrel, 
Brother Wild Cherry, and Brother Milk- 
weed, I refer to you. Brothers Sorrel and 
Milkweed make a possible salad when we 
are reduced to extremities, but how much 
better it would be if the ground you occupy 
were filled by Brothers Chard and Lettuce. 
Brother Oxheart Cherry takes no more room 


[35] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


in my orchard than Brother Chokecherry, 
but how delicious is the one and how puckery 
the other! 

Yet I must not blame you until I clear my 
own moral garden of the third best and 
fourth best, when I might have first best, vir- 
tues growing there. I amnot often more than 
five minutes late to church, but I might just 
as well be on time. I conscientiously give a 
tenth of my income in charity, but I am sure 
that with a little extra self-denial I could 
give a fifth. I[ never intend to retail any 
choice morsel of scandal about my neighbors, 
but I sometimes listen while others roll it 
under their tongues. Henceforth I will 
strive to plant whole virtues instead of half 
virtues in the garden of my soul. 

Finally and lastly, this leads me to say, 
Brother Weeds, I know of but one way to 
keep you where you belong, and that is to 
fill your places with a useful growth. I have 
noticed that peas and pursley, like every- 
thing else, obey the law of the impenetrabil- 
ity of matter. “They cannot occupy the same 
spot at the same time. I can cultivate beans 
or burdocks, but not both in the same gar- 
den-patch; for you, Brother Burdock, will 
strangle Brother Bean unless we see to it 
that he has the right of way. We can raise 


[36] 


A SERMON TO MY BROTHER WEEDS 


your great family, Brother Witch Grass, 
without half trying, for you have ten mil- 
lion children, but we prefer Brother Timothy 
and Brother Redtop, and we will see to it 
that they flourish in our acres and their 
moral kinsfolk in the gardens of our souls. 


[37] 


CHAPTER V 


FARMING AS A MORAL EQUIVA-. 
LENT FOR. WAR 


That always interesting, pragmatic phil- 
osopher, William James, once suggested that 
something should be discovered as a moral 
equivalent for war. It should be an occu- 
pation that would develop manly qualities, 
that would require grit and vigor, and would 
whet what President Roosevelt used to call 
the “fighting edge’ of character, which at 
the same time would be useful for the com- 
munity and state, and not destructive and 
barbarous as is war between men and na- 
tions. Professor James suggested various 
useful but humdrum employments like wash- 
ing windows, washing dishes, mending roads, 
fishing on the Grand Banks, and the like, 
for the gilded and idle youth who now speed 
in automobiles or loll on piazzas and lead 
frivolous or vicious lives—a menace to so- 
ciety and the nation. 

I think, with all due deference to the mem- 
ory of the great philosopher, I can improve 
on his suggestions, and propose an employ- 
ment which, in the classic language of the 


[38] 


FARMING AS A MORAL EQUIVALENT FOR WAR 


colleges, will ‘‘put it all over” these other oc- 
cupations as a useful retainer of the fighting 
instinct, a hardener of the muscle, a quick- 
ener of the brain, a developer of resource- 
fulness, and a sharpener of the will on the 
hard grindstone of opposition. ‘This occu- 
pation is as old as Adam, as respectable as 
Cincinnatus, as beautiful as the Garden of 
Eden. It is none other than the ancient and 
honorable profession of farming. 

But what I am chiefly concerned about 
in this article is not its age nor its respecta- 
bility, but its useful development of the com- 
bative elements in our nature, which were 
evidently implanted for some good purpose; 
in fact, as my title indicates, I desire to con- 
sider farming as a moral equivalent for war. 
Some people are very much afraid that when 
all our swords are beaten into ploughshares, 
and all our spears into pruninghooks, human- 
ity will deteriorate and the race of heroes 
will die out. Do not be afraid of this, my 
friends, while farms remain to cultivate, and 
weeds grow, and worms wriggle, and moths 
fly. Let no one deceive himself on this point. 
The Creator has furnished for anyone who 
owns or cultivates a rod of land, all the op- 
position that a healthy man needs to keep 
his fighting edge keen and bright. 


[39] 





THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 





Here is my little farm, for instance. It 
furnishes as good an illustration as any 
other. The winter’s snow and rain and frost 
no sooner relax their hold on my few acres 
than the fight begins, and if I fail to be on 
my guard for a single week, yes, for a single 
day, the enemy takes advantage of my care- 
lessness and my forces are routed. 

With eagerness I waited for the soil to get 
sufficiently warm and mellow to sow the first 
seeds, and, with hope of a glorious harvest, 
I planted my earliest vegetables, which are 
warranted to withstand a little frosty nip. 
My peas and radishes and cauliflower were 
buried in their appropriate beds and lovingly 
left to Nature’s kindly care. A little later 
my corn and beans and cucumbers and melons 
and squashes were planted, and then my 
tomatoes and eggplants were set out. I 
fancied that only my family and myself and 
a few kindly neighbors, who, I was con- 
ceited enough to suppose, rather envied my 
agricultural skill, knew what I was doing. 
But I was mistaken. Ten thousand little 
beady eyes watched my maneuvers, ten thou- 
sand wriggling creatures congratulated them- 
selves on their coming victory. 

I heard the crows in the neighboring pine 
trees cawing and caucusing together, and, 


[40] 


FARMING AS A MORAL EQUIVALENT FOR WAR 


in my manlike folly, which pooh-poohs at 
anything it does not understand, I said: 
‘Those foolish crows have just one raucous 
note. Why can’t they say something sen- 
sible and melodious?’’ In reality they were 
saying to each other, ‘‘He’s planted his corn; 
he’s planted his corn. I know where /’ll get 
my breakfast tomorrow morn.” Sure 
enough, they did, and as they got up an hour 
or two before I thought of rising, they were 
in my cornfield long before I was, and the 
first round of the battle was theirs. To be 
sure, I could replant my corn, but that was 
a confession of defeat, as though a general 
allowed his troops to be mowed down and 
then had to fill up his regiment with raw 
recruits which in turn were just as likely to 
be slaughtered. 

The cutworm brigade of the enemy was 
more patient than the crows, as it needed to 
be. ‘They bided their time, and just when 
the cauliflower and brussels sprouts and cu- 
cumbers timidly pushed their green heads 
above the brown soil, they captured them, 
gorged their loathsome bodies with the ten- 
derest juices of the young plants, and left 
me defeated, with my garden strewn with the 
wilted and dying remnants of the crops that 
only yesterday gave so fair a promise. All 


[41] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


this in a single night. Each plant had its 
own worm, just one single worm, but there 
were enough worms to go around. It was 
as if the worms met together in a council 
of war and the general-in-chief marshaled 
his troops with consummate skill, assigning 
to each soldier his post—cauliflower, cab- 
bage, or cucumber, as the case might be. 
They all obeyed orders implicitly, and I was 
routed—horse, foot, and dragoons. 

I could have borne the disappointment and 
attributed it all to the notoriously uncertain 
hazards of war, if the enemy had been less 
wanton, if the worms had eaten the rations 
they captured; but no, they simply cut the 
plants in two near the ground, and left the 
beans to wither in the sun and the roots to 
dry up. They were like a regiment of looters 
who could eat but little, and carry away 
nothing, and who, for the mere fiendish pleas- 
ure of destruction, burned and ravaged 
everything that came in their way. How- 
ever, I replanted and reset my melon and 
cucumber vines and cabbage plants, protected 
them with fences of tarred paper, placed 
mines of “bug earth” and “Kno-worm”’ 
around them on every side, and girded up 
my loins with patience once more. 

By that time the battalions of the air were 


[42] 


FARMING AS A MORAL EQUIVALENT FOR WAR 


descending on my trees, and I hastened to 
turn my attention to them. Here I seemed 
more helpless than before. It was as though 
the perfected war aeroplane had been put to 
this base use and the enemy came flying from 
the blue to discomfit me. The gypsy moth, the 
brown-tail moth, and, above all, the codling 
moth, all attacked me from above. ‘The lat- 
ter flies only by night and does not begin his 
depredations until honest folk have gone to 
bed. Then he gets in his deadly work, and, 
it is estimated, ruins half the apple crop of 
the United States by his nocturnal attacks. 
How cunningly he plans his campaign against 
this king of fruits! No Napoleon ever better 
understood the act of harassing the enemy. 
He waits until the right moment, and when 
he sees the blossom falling his army comes 
flying to the orchard. He glues his eggs 
to the embryo apple or near it. In about 
a week these eggs hatch and the little 
worms wriggle their way into the cup-like 
blossom end of the apple. Here they hide 
and feed for several days—then they bore 
their way into the very core, and the days 
of that apple are numbered. ‘The apple 
indeed may live and grow, but it will always 
be a poor, knurly, wormy, worthless thing. 

But the codling moth is only one of the 


[43] 





THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


enemies of my trees. here are the regi- 
ments of lice that get into the leaf and curl 
it up; and the light infantry of the apple 
maggot, a tiny worm that burrows into the 
fruit in all directions; and the tent cater- 
pillar that camps on my trees, and houses 
a thousand troops under the dome of a single 
tent; and the scale of different kinds, San 
José and oyster-shell and scurvy, all of which 
attack the bark. Every tree in my orchard 
has its own particular enemy. The cherry has 
the “May beetle,” the “rose-bug,’”’ and the 
“brown rot.” The pear has the “pear tree 
slug’ and the “pear blight’; the plum has 
the deadly curculio and the “plum gorger”’; 
and the peach the “peach rosette.” 

But not only does every tree have its own 
enemies; every part of the tree has its 
foes. ‘The bark has its borer and its scale, 
the leaf its lice and curlers, the blossom its 
moths, the fruit its borers. Each enemy 
knows exactly the weakest part of the citadel 
he has to attack. He knows the exact mo- 
ment when his attack will be most effective. 
He has the accumulated experience of a 
thousand ancestors behind him. He never 
makes a mistake in his maneuvers, or fails 
to avail himself of the psychological moment. 

What, then, can I, a mere man, do with a 


[44] 


FARMING AS A MORAL EQUIVALENT FOR WAR 


thousand watchful, unmerciful foes to com- 
bat, a mere man with only one pair of hands 
and one poor brain to oppose these multi- 
farious enemies, or, if I do not forget to 
count my Portuguese assistant farmer, two 
pairs of hands and two poor brains at the 
most and best? Shall I give up the fight 
and call myself beaten by the worm and the 
moth and the crow and the weed, which I 
have hitherto forgotten to mention, but 
which is always ready to spring up and take 
my plants by the throat? By no means! 
Here comes in the joy of the struggle. Here 
is the delight of a fair fight and no favor. 
Quarter is neither asked nor given. I will 
oppose the wisdom and skill and resources 
of my kind against worm and weed and moth 
and bird. Come one, come all. I defy you 
to do your worst. I have got my artillery 
ready. My battery consists of two sprayers, 
one for the trees and one for the plants. My 
ammunition is of various kinds, but largely 
consists of Bordeaux mixture, Paris green, 
arsenate of lead, whale-oil soap, and tobacco 
tea. I spray and spray and spray again. As 
often as the enemy attacks, I sally out to 
meet him with my long and deadly tube of 
poison. 

I do not always wait for him to assume 


[45] 





THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 





the defensive, but as soon as he shows his 
head I[ train my artillery upon him. It is a 
fight to the finish. ‘There can be no drawn 
battle in this war. There can be no peace 
without victory. One or the other must win. 
Little by little I find my enemy giving way. 
The spraying pump drives the worms out of 
their fastnesses. The potato bugs give up 
the fight, conquered by Paris green and the 
sprayer. The cutworms are overcome by 
constant watchfulness and frequent replant- 
ing. The scale I attack with kerosene emul- 
sion and whale-oil soap. The curculio I 
knock off and destroy. The tent caterpillars 
I burn in their own gauzy tabernacles, and lo! 
when the autumn comes, in spite of innumer- 
able foes—foes that creep and crawl and fly 
and bore—lI am the victor. My apples are 
rosy and fleckless; my peaches are delicious; 
my cauliflowers lift up their great white 
heads out of their chalices, asking to be 
plucked; my tomatoes hang red and luscious 
on their vines; my potatoes are smooth and 
spotless; my corn is full-eared, sweet, and 
juicy, and if I am not a better and stronger 
man for my tussle with nature and the ene- 
mies of my farm, then there is no virtue in 
war, and no value in the “fighting edge.” 


[46] 


CHAPTER VI 


UNDER THE WILLOW IN THE 
SPRING 


I have a favorite sanctuary, where I go 
when I wish to be alone, and where I write 
my books and articles and editorials. It is 
under a great willow tree on my little farm 
at Sagamore. ‘This is, I think, the largest 
willow I ever saw, or rather it is a collection 
of willows, for thirteen large trunks spring- 
ing from one root unite at the bottom and 
spread out their great arms in every direc- 
tion, their lateral reach being more than one 
hundred feet north and south. A willow 
likes to soak its feet in the water, and a small 
pond three hundred feet long and half as 
broad washes its roots. Around the pond 
are alders and viburnums and oaks and firs 
and a quince bush or two, as well as a tangle 
of grapevines, and any number of beautiful 
ferns. Behind rises a little hill covered with 
hard pines, on the top of which is “‘Pine-I'ree 
Knoll.” 

But this article has to do not with my trees 
and my little pond, much as I love them, but 


[47] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


with the tame wild visitors that come to see 
me while I am writing. I have to sit very 
still for a while before they are quite sure 
that I donot want to hurt them. They donot 
mind my writing if my pen does not scratch, 
for they are all going about their own busi- 
ness and are perfectly willing I should go 
about mine. 

Yesterday a red squirrel came to get a 
drink in the pond. He jumped from a large 
pine tree to an oak, and was just going down 
a natural grapevine ladder when a catbird 
spied him and determined that he should go 
thirsty for one morning at least. Nimble as 
he was, she was spryer still, for she had wings 
that more than matched his twinkling feet. 
When he ran along a limb, she flitted to the 
other end and screamed at him, as much as 
to say, ‘“You come an inch farther, and I'll 
pick your eyes out!’”? Then he dropped to 
the limb below, and she flew to the one just 
above him and repeated her warning. Then 
he essayed to go down his grapevine ladder, 
but she was there before him to dispute his 
passage. At last he got discouraged, and 
slunk back thirsty into the woods, where- 
upon the mother catbird gave a triumphant 
scream, and went back to her nest-building in 
the alders. My sympathies were altogether 


[48] 


UNDER THE WILLOW IN THE SPRING 


with the mother bird, for the red squirrel is a 
great thief, having a special fondness for 
birds’ eggs. Indeed, he and his kith and kin 
and the quarrelsome English sparrow are 
perhaps the worst enemies that our native 
birds have to endure. 

I once met Ernest Harold Baynes, that 
great bird-lover and ornithologist, near his 
Bird Sanctuary in Meriden, New Hampshire. 
For a peaceable bird-lover he looked very 
warlike just then, with a double-barreled 
shotgun and a belt full of cartridges. But 
he was fighting for liberty and permanent 
peace in the bird world, against which the 
ruthless red squirrels were waging war. | 
should like to have heard what the red squir- 
rels had to say about it. I have no doubt 
they could have made out a pretty good case 
for themselves. 

The pair of catbirds celebrated their vic- 
tory with a splendid chorus of song, for it 
may not be known to all my readers that in 
addition to his caterwauling, which is some- 
times very disagreeable, the catbird has a 
great variety of notes and songs, and de- 
serves the name of ‘“‘the northern mocking 
bird,” quite as much as that of the genus 
felis for which he is usually called. More- 
over, he is a trim and dapper bird, with every 


[49] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


feather of his blue-black coat in perfect or- 
der. This trim neatness, by the way, is char- 
acteristic of all my tame wild friends. They 
plume and prink like a young lady going to 
a party, and they take frequent baths. That 
is one reason why my pond is so popular. It 
offers them both cleanliness and drink. In- 
deed, I think all wild creatures are careful 
of their toilet, and are far more fond of 
being specklessly clean and neat than their 
average human neighbor. 

My next visitors today were two kingbirds, 
and they showed me a new trick in kingbird 
tactics. I have often seen them sit on a 
limb of a tree or on a telegraph wire, their 
keen little eyes alert to the flutter of every 
winged insect, darting like a shot from their 
perch and never missing their victim. But 
these kingbirds were fishermen as well as 
fly-catchers; for, seeing some water-bugs 
swimming contentedly on the surface of the 
pond, they dove for them from their perch 
on the willow tree, like gulls going for hap- 
less minnows. Sometimes they would be al- 
most, if not quite, submerged; but they never 
missed their prey. 

The kingbird is even more of a fighter 
than the catbird, and is bound to be cock of 
the walk wherever he lives. One thing I like 


[50] 





UNDER THE WILLOW IN THE SPRING 


about him, however; he doesn’t pick on little 
native birds, nor even take a bird of his size, 
when he wants to fight, but never hesitates 
to tackle a bird ten times as big as himself. 
Even crows have no terror for him, but he 
constantly plagues the life out of them, as 
he would say, if he spoke colloquially. 

But the tiny birds of my sanctuary please 
me quite as much as the more obtrusive ones: 
the warblers and the ever-cheerful chicka- 
dees, which will almost roost on your finger 
so confiding are they—almost but not quite, 
as a rule, except in wintertime, when a handful 
of hemp seed will tempt them to any degree 
of familiarity. I have been struck with the 
delicate tints of my friends, the black and 
white warblers or creepers, as they are some- 
times called. So delicate are they that you 
must sit very still and let them come quite 
near before you fully appreciate them. An 
opera-glass will greatly help you really to 
know the warblers. Then you will see most 
dainty colorings of red and yellow and blue 
as they go flitting among the leaves of a tree, 
looking for bugs and larve—thus, by caring 
for your fruit trees, rewarding you a hun- 
dredfold for any kindness you may show 
them, and never sending in a bill. The 
warblers will often repay you, too, not only 


[51] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


by eating noxious insects, but by sitting on 
a limb close to your head and rendering a 
solo for your special benefit, thus shaming 
other professional singers who will never sing 
except before a large audience. 

I should also state that my little pond at- 
tracts larger game than squirrels and birds. 
At certain seasons a small herd of deer comes 
down to drink, in spite of the fact that my 
farm is within a mile and a half of a large 
manufacturing village. But you must be up 
betimes to see them; for, like other wild 
things, they are daylight-savers, and have 
set their alarm-clock at the crack of dawn. 
When they have had a drink, they sometimes 
wander into my garden, and I have noticed 
that they regard my string beans as a spe- 
cially toothsome delicacy. However, I am 
willing to share with them, if they will leave 
a few for home use, as they usually do. 

In my pond, too, are some big goldfish, 
which were only fingerlings when I put them 
in three years ago. ‘They rejoice in the sun- 
light, and on a bright day in spring they come 
up into the shallow water and lie close to the 
surface, even sticking their back fins above 
the water, evidently enjoying the sunlight 
no less than I do myself. Perhaps they de- 
light to show their brilliant sides, for Solo- 


[52] 


UNDER THE WILLOW IN THE SPRING 


mon in all his glory never had a coat like 
theirs. The horned pouts—I am glad the 

ugly things have so ugly a name—keep to 
the bottom, in the mud. I don’t wonder they 
refuse to show off. The frogs and the tur- 
tles, on the other hand, live on the land in 
summer, except for an occasional dive be- 
neath the wave, when a possibly unfriendly 
footstep comes too near. The turtles are 
very careful to sit on the edge of the bank 
or on a projecting piece of wood, so that it 
is as easy for them to take a bath as falling 
off a log. 

One verse from the Bible that often comes 
to mind as I sit in my sanctuary while I write 
and watch my tame wild friends is, ‘“‘O Lord, 
how manifold are thy works! in wisdom 
hast thou made them all: the earth is full of 
thy riches.” 


[53] 


CHAPTER VII 
MY DOORSTEP VISITORS 


I have other friends besides those that 
visit me in the bird sanctuary under the big 
willow by the little pond. I do not have to 
seek them out. They come to me. [| think 
they regard me as a special providence, for 
I came to my farm early this year before the 
snowstorms were over, and when there was 
little for them to eat in the woods. In fact, 
I was never so popular with my feathered 
friends before, especially after a certain 
April blizzard, when the snow in drifts was 
piled up four feet deep around the farm- 
house. Then I cleared a piece of ground a 
few yards square, and sprinkled it with 
crumbs and chicken-feed, and hung up a wire 
basket containing a big piece of suet. You 
should have seen how my tame wild friends 
came to the feast. I couldn’t entirely acquit 
them of selfishness; for most of them never 
favored me with many visits before, and I 
have no doubt the cynical definition of grati- 
tude would apply to them: ‘Gratitude is a 
lively expectation of benefits yet to be re- 
ceived.”” However, though I realized that 


[54] 


MY DOORSTEP VISITORS 


many of them were bread-and-butter friends, 
who would flit as soon as worms and insects 
became plenty, I welcomed them one and all, 
for friends are worth having even if their 
motives are not unmixed. 

The sparrows were by far the most nu- 
merous of my doorstep friends, and what a 
variety there was! Song sparrows, the sweet- 
est of all our tuneful birds, with their modest 
plumage and the three little black spots on 
the breasts of the gentlemen; the chipping 
sparrows with their reddish heads and their 
Quaker gray waistcoats; the white-throated 
sparrows with a clerical-looking necktie un- 
der their chins; and, most trim and saucy of 
all, the white-crowned sparrows, with their 
handsome heads in which a broad white 
stripe predominates. They are most dapper 
birds, and it seemed to me showed a little 
contempt for their more sober relatives. 
However, they were on a week-end visit and 
stayed only one day; for they were migrants, 
and were on their way to their nesting 
grounds in Canada. But they made up in 
numbers for their short stay, for I counted 
twenty near my doorstep at one time. My 
best breakfasts would not make them linger, 
and after twenty-four hours they packed up 
their belongings and winged their way north- 


[55] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


ward. ‘The white-throated sparrows re- 
mained longer, but they mostly left in the 
course of a fortnight, while the juncos, which 
are allied to the sparrows, stayed longer 
still; and a few, I think, will be with us all 
summer. [he song sparrows and the chip- 
ping sparrows, like the poor, are always with 
us, and never disdain friendship’s offering. 
Neither do the English sparrows, but they 
steal what they get. It is never a free-will 
offering that I give to them. Most people 
do not realize that there are no fewer than 
thirty-three different kinds of sparrows listed 
in the popular bird books as found in 
America, and I have no doubt several other 
kinds were among my dooryard friends be- 
sides the five I have mentioned, but I am not 
expert enough in ornithology to know them 
all when I see them. 

Still another bird that honored us with 
frequent visits in the famine season of the 
spring was the cowbird, a beautiful creature 
when you get near enough to admire him. 
His brown head has a peculiarly warm tint, 
contrasting with his glossy green-black body 
that glows like burnished steel in the sun- 
shine. He, too, became very friendly and 
very numerous, and did not disdain to pick 
up his crumbs amid a whole flock of sparrows 


[56] 


MY DOORSTEP VISITORS 


of various kinds. But if bird-men (not avia- 
tors, but ornithologists) are to be believed, 
he or she is a sad slacker, never making her 
own nest, or hatching her own young, but 
laying in any other bird’s nest that comes 
handy, a bluebird’s, or tree-swallow’s or 
robin’s, while she lets the other birds hatch 
and bring up her children—a most reprehen- 
sible mother! When the chewinks came 
back from the South they also took an early 
breakfast or an afternoon tea with us fre- 
quently, though they were not so friendly 
as the sparrows, juncos, and cowbirds. 

The robins seldom mingled with their 
smaller brethren in the scramble for seeds, 
but turned their attention largely to worms, 
which became amazingly plentiful when the 
warm rains descended, the whole yard being 
perforated with their holes like a sieve. It 
was very amusing to see the robins cock their 
heads on one side as though listening for a 
worm at his hole, then suddenly dive for it, 
and never miss pulling out an unwilling wrig- 
eler. JI wonder what sort of noise angle- 
worms make, and whether they have a lan- 
guage of their own. If so, our dull ears are 
not finely enough attuned to hear it. 

The bluebirds came with the robins, or 
possibly a day or two before them, and there 


[57] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


is nothing more lovely than to see them dart- 
ing from tree to tree, as though a speck of 
summer sky had been let loose and floated 
down to earth. 

The tree swallows came very early, too, 
and, though they did not patronize our door- 
step table, they did the next best thing and 
circled around it, swooping down and almost 
touching our heads at times as they chased 
the moths and flies and other winged prey. 
The gentlemen of this family are very beau- 
tiful birds, with backs and heads a brilliant 
greenish blue, and white breasts; and they 
have all the grace and swiftness of movement 
that belong to the swallow family. In spite 
of what the books say, their wives look to 
me very much like them. 

It is true, however, that nature in the bird 
kingdom often lavishes most of her beauty 
on the males, thus reversing the laws of the 
human family. The lady oriole, for instance, 
is a very unobtrusive little bird that you 
would not think belonged in the same family 
as her shining bridegroom. So is Mrs. Scar- 
let Tanager, whose husband is the most gor- 
geous of all our northern birds. The same 
is true of the cardinal, the cowbird, the rose- 
breasted grosbeak, and a multitude of other 
lady birds. 


[58] 





MY DOORSTEP VISITORS 


A little later in the season than the spar- 
rows and warblers come our most brilliant 
birds, the Baltimore orioles, the scarlet tana- 
gers, and the goldfinches. We who live in 
the north are likely to think that the most 
gorgeous birds belong to the tropics, and do 
not visit our cold northern shores. It is 
true that the great parrot families are deni- 
zens of the tropics, and they are largely re- 
sponsible for this impression; but I have wan- 
dered through the tropic jungles of Brazil 
and Africa, and, except for the parrots, I 
have never seen birds that for brilliance and 
delicacy of coloring surpass some of our 
northern friends, and as for the screeching, 
harsh-voiced parrots, I wouldn’t give an 
oriole, a bluebird, or a tanager for the whole 
lot of them. The oriole always reminds me 
of a piece of sunrise sky, flitting from tree to 
tree, while the tanager is a flame of fire, in- 
tense enough to set the green leaves ablaze. 
The goldfinch is as brilliant as any Hartz 
Mountain canary and as tame, and one is 
tempted to think that the door of a neighbor’s 
bird cage has sprung open, and let the pets 
escape. The goldfinch, too, is a sociable lit- 
tle fellow, and does not disdain my doorstep 
table. 

I haven’t time to introduce my readers 


[59] 





THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


to all the feathered friends that have called 
on me this spring and summer. ‘The list 
would be a long one, and I have persuaded 
some of them to stay not only to their meals, 
but to lodge with me and rear their families 
on my farm. Not only robins and sparrows 
of various kinds, but bluebirds, tree swallows, 
flickers, and downy woodpeckers thus hon- 
ored me last year; and I hope more guests 
will engage the houses, rent free, that I have 
put up for them this year. Some, however, 
like the sparrows, robins, brown thrushes, 
orioles, warblers and whippoorwills, prefer 
to be their own architects: and to that I will 
not object, since they pleasure me with their 
presence and their songs. 

It is surprising how soon birds know where 
they are welcome and wanted. ‘The little 
village of Meriden, N. H., has become fa- 
mous throughout the country as a “Bird 
Sanctuary,” not only because of the large 
tract of land set apart for feathered bipeds, 
but because in almost every yard they find a 
home. Food boxes and nests, and the univer- 
sal kindness of the people, have made them 
so tame that they fly to their hosts, sit on 
their heads and fingers, and eat out of their 
mouths; and even in winter the snowy lawns 
are dotted with scores of birds that defy the 


[60] 





MY DOORSTEP VISITORS 





cold. Yet Meriden is no better situated than 
any other small town in the United States 
or Canada to attract the birds. ‘The winters 
are cold and long, but the men and women 
behind the bird boxes and the food trays 
have made the place famous. Mr. Ernest 
Harold Baynes has his house here, and 
seems to have inspired all his neighbors with 
his hospitable spirit toward our songsters. 
The village has a bird library, and even en- 
joys a ‘Bird Sunday,” when the village min- 
isters preach on God’s care for the birds, 
and our duty to them. Last year one hun- 
dred and one pairs of birds of no less than 
fifty-three different species are known to have 
raised families—some of them several fami- 
lies—in the tract of land called the “‘Meriden 
Bird Club Sanctuary,” besides a multitude 
more that nested in other parts of the town. 

There are now nearly two hundred ‘“‘Meri- 
den Bird Clubs” throughout the country, and 
they are found in almost every state. Why 
should there not be a bird club in every town 
for the protection of our trees and crops, and 
especially for the cultivation of the finer 
graces which love and care for our feathered 
friends are sure to bring to any community? 


[61] 


CHAPTER VIII 


BIRDS IN THE BUSH AND BIRDS IN 
THE BOOK 


Next to the joy of following our native 
birds to their native heath, seeing them flit 
from limb to limb, and hearing their joyous 
carols, is that of greeting them in the pages 
of some sympathetic author, who expresses 
our feelings concerning the songsters whom 
we love, but are inarticulate to praise. Miss 
Abby P. Churchill, of the State Normal 
School in Fitchburg, Mass., has brought to- 
gether many of the best things that the poets 
have said about these feathered friends, in 
a little book called ‘‘Birds in Literature,” 
from which I think she will allow me to cull 
for my readers some choice extracts. 

The beauty of the writings of a genuine 
bird lover, who also has the literary gift, is 
that he can express the characteristics of 
the bird, apparently his very thoughts; and, 
as we read these descriptions of the various 
common songsters of our woods and fields, 
we realize the distinct individuality of each 
bird and the particular place which Nature 


[62] 


BIRDS IN THE BUSH AND BIRDS IN THE BOOK 


has assigned him in the great orchestra of 
the woods. For instance, what could be more 
characteristic or exactly descriptive of the 
bluebird’s well known habit of flitting from 
fence-post to fence-post, as one walks along 
the country roadside, than Lowell’s lines: 


“The bluebird, shifting his light load of 
song 

From post to post along the cheerless 
fence.” 


The bobolink, next to the robin, perhaps, 
has inspired the song of more poets than any 
other bird. Of him C. P. Cranch says: 


“When Nature had made all her birds, 
With no more cares to think on, 
She gave a rippling laugh, and out 
There flew a Bobolinkon.”’ 


Bryant, who always had an ear for birds 
as well as for all melodies, has written a well- 
known poem of considerable length about 
“Robert of Lincoln,’ the first stanza of 
which is as follows: 


‘Merrily swinging on brier and weed, 
Near to the nest of his little dame, 
Over the mountain side or mead, 
Robert of Lincoln is telling his name: 


[63] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 








Bob-o’-link, bob-o’-link, 
Spink, spank, spink; 
Snug and safe is that nest of ours, 


Hidden among the summer flowers, 
Chee, chee, chee.” 


Naturally the robin occupies much space in 
the poet’s calendar, though he is by no means, 
in my estimation, the most charming of our 
American birds; for he is often quarrelsome, 
and at certain times of the year he has a 
monotonous chirp which is almost distressing. 
However, he forces himself upon public 
notice. He has no undue modesty. He is 
a good advertiser, and so he stands more 
distinctly than any other bird for the coming 
of the springtime. Scores of poets have eu- 
logized not only the robin redbreast as we 
know him, but the truer robin redbreast of 
Great Britain, whose name and memory our 
homesick ancestors transferred to the com- 
mon thrush of our own woods. 

Here is what Lucy Larcom says of Sir 
Robin: 


“Robin, Sir Robin, gay, red-vested knight. 
Now you have come to us, summer’s in 
sight. 
You never dream of the wonders you bring, 
Visions that follow the flash of your wing; 


[64] 





BIRDS IN THE BUSH AND BIRDS IN THE BOOK 


How all the beautiful by and by 

Around you and after you seems to fly! 
Sing on, or eat on, as pleases your mind! 
Well have you earned every morsel you 


nd. 
Ay, ha! ha! ha!’ whistles Robin. ‘My dear, 
Let us all take our own choice of good 
Elect. a 


The robin has the great advantage as a 
self-advertiser of coming very early in the 
spring; sometimes, in fact, he stays with us 
throughout the whole winter. He is often 
preceded, however, by the bluebird and one 
or two inconspicuous warblers. Thus his 
early appearance, before the woods are vocal 
with the songs of a thousand of his mates of 
different size and plumage, makes an im- 
pression not only upon us people of prose, 
but upon the poets, and once caused E. C. 
Stedman to sing: 


“The sweetest sound the whole year ’round: 
"Tis the first robin of the spring! 
The song of the full orchard choir 
Is not so fine a thing!” 


But many of our “common or garden” 
birds have attracted the attention of poets, 
as well as the few favored ones. I imagine 
that few of my readers know how charming 


[65] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


a singer the catbird is. As I have said, he 
is well called the “northern mocking bird,” 
for he has more songs in his repertoire and 
more notes in his vocabulary than any other 
of our northern birds. Minot J. Savage has 
well characterized the varied parts that he 
plays in the bird orchestra in a rather 
long poem, which ends as follows: 


“Catbird, but I love thee still, 
By the brookside, ‘neath the hill, 
Laughing, mocking in the trees, 
Feathered Mephistopheles; 
Playing out thy varied part, 
Mirroring the human heart; 
Fretting, scolding, scornful, then 
Bursting out in joy again. 

Good and evil catbird 
On the alder spray, 
Like thy contradictions 

Run our lives away.” 


Even the crow has his biographer, if not 
his eulogist, among the poets, and Clinton 
Scollard has asked this question of him, and 
received this answer, which we oft hear him 
give as he sits on the topmost branch of a 
dead pine tree: 


“O, say, Jim Crow, 
Why is it you always go 
[66] 


BIRDS IN THE BUSH AND BIRDS IN THE BOOK 


With a gloomy coat of black 
‘The year long on your back? 
Why don’t you change its hue 
At least for a day or two, 
To red or green or blue? 
And why do you always wear 
Such a sober, sombre air, 
As glum as the face of Care? 
I wait for your reply. 
And into the peaceful pause 
There comes a curious, croaking cry, 
‘O, because! ’cause! ’cause!’ ”’ 


I wish I had space in this chapter to intro- 
duce you to all my feathered favorites, or at 
least to tell you what the poets can say of 
them so much better than I can say it; but 
I cannot close without writing of my greatest 
favorite of all, the song sparrow, the modest, 
little, brown-coated, unobtrusive bird, which - 
comes so early in the spring, and stays with 
us so long, and never, as many birds do, for- 
gets his song the whole summer through. He 
is trim and neat, but has no distinguishing 
features which mark him as a brilliant 
beauty; and yet of all the birds there is not 
one which seems to have more genuine 
thoughts of praise in his heart, or offers 
them with such tuneful and joyous abandon. 
I see him at almost any hour of the day on 


[67] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


a little bush near my house, pouring out his 
whole soul in melody. 

Florence A. Merriam tells us that “the 
student who is interested in noting bird songs 
will find the song sparrow’s well worth study, 
for it varies remarkably. Fifteen varieties 
of its song have been noted in one week, 
and the same individual often has a number 
of tunes in his repertoire.” Thoreau calls 
him a poet’ who sings all summer, and says: 
‘‘Any man can write verses in the love sea- 
son. ... We are most interested in those 
birds that sing for the love of music and not 
of their mates, who meditate their strains, 
and amuse themselves with singing, the birds 
whose strains are of deeper sentiment.”’ And 
here is what Henry van Dyke says of him, 
and he exactly expresses my feelings and love 
for the dearest little warbler of all: 


“*T like the tune, I like the words: 

They seem so true, so far from art, 
So friendly and so full of heart, 

That if but one of all the birds 
Could be my comrade everywhere, 
My little brother of the air, 

This is the one I’d choose, my dear, 

Because he’d bless me, every year, 

With ‘Sweet-sweet-sweet-very-merry- 

cheers; 


[68] 


CHAPTER IX 
OUT OF DOORS IN THE AUTUMN 


Here I find myself once more writing un- 
der the old willow, as in the springtime six 
months ago. Then the catkins were just be- 
ginning to show the white feather, and I had 
to look closely to see that the oak buds had 
begun to realize that spring would ever come. 
Since then they have swelled and burst, and 
the oak trees have tossed them on their 
branches for many a long day, defying old 
Boreas, who lives on Cape Cod all the year 
around. Today some of these oak trees are 
one great, glorious pyramid of flame, redder 
than any maple that incarnadines New 
Hampshire’s granite hills. Other oaks clothe 
themselves in modest browns. I notice that, 
though the leaves of the flame-colored oak 
have begun to fall, but very few are yet upon 
the ground; for an oak makes up for its late 
appearance in the spring by clinging to its 
foliage late in the autumn. Indeed, in some 
varieties the brown leaves rustle on the cold 
twigs all winter long, until the young buds 
actually push them off, saying, ‘Get off my 


[69] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


erch;: it’s my turn to have a look at the 
p y) 


world.” 

The leaves on the big willow are all gone; 
the precious catkins look dry and dead; and 
the clinging grapevines that festoon the 
lower branches of the willow seem sick, dis- 
couraged, and frostbitten, while the oaks 
flaunt in their faces their gayest colors. So 
it is often with precocious children. They 
use up all their bright sayings while they are 
young, while the steady plodder who de- 
velops late lasts long. Whether this gener- 
alization is true or not, it is a comfort to us 
mediocre fellows who never had any bright 
sayings recorded of us in our childhood. 

My English friends sometimes gently de- 
ride me for various Americanisms which they 
are pleased to note, and one of them is the 
use of the word “‘fall” instead of ‘‘autumn”’ 
to indicate the ninth, tenth, and eleventh 
months of the year. But after all it is a most 
expressive term. As everything is springing 
to new life in the third, fourth, and fifth 
months of the year, and we call that season 
‘spring,’ so everything is falling in the later 
months. How the leaves swirl down as they 
fall in the fall! ‘The rosy apples demon- 
strate over again Sir Isaac Newton’s great 
discovery; the woodchucks dig themselves in, 


[70] 


/ 





OUT OF DOORS IN THE AUTUMN 


and fall asleep; and the turtles on my little 
pond follow suit. Yes, it is the falling time 
of the year, and there is nothing sad about it 
if we only remember the great law of nature, 
that everything must fall to rise again. The 
leaf must fall, or we can have no buds next 
year. The apple must fall if we are ever to 
have another crop. We must fall asleep be- 
fore we can wake. We must die before we 
can share in the resurrection. I am not sure 
which is the more delightful season, the 
spring or the fall. Spring is the season of 
hope and anticipation. Fall is the time of 
fulfillment, of peace and plenty. ‘The pile of 
big, yellow pumpkins about the farmhouse 
door, the smaller mound of white carrots and 
red mangel-wurtzels, the barrels of apples 
and potatoes, all add their joy to the fall— 
joys which the spring can only anticipate. 
But to get back to my seat under the old 
willow. The birds are still with us as they 
were in the spring, but they seem more sub- 
dued and quite tongue-tied. I hardly hear a 
chirp, though the fly-catchers are still darting 
after their winged prey, and the creepers are 
searching for other inhabitants under every 
rough piece of bark, and the woodpeckers 
are using their bill-hammers industriously. 
But in the spring how the birds did chatter 


[71] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


as well as sing! I imagine they were con- 
sulting about housekeeping and the care of 
the children, and those are always prolific 
subjects of small talk. Then Mrs. Catbird 
insisted on building her nest in the jungle of 
bushes near the pond, while Mr. Catbird 
was afraid that it would be too convenient 
for the snake or the red squirrel. But the lady 
had her way, I think, as she usually does. 
The birds were courting, too, in the spring; 
and that involves an immense amount of 
chatter and no end of love songs. Now 
they are sober old married folks, and though 
very likely they are still fonder of each other, 
they find fewer things that must be said. 
Yet there are some exceptions to the rule 
of taciturnity. The blue jays are just as noisy 
and impertinently talkative as ever. What 
saucy, bright, immaculately dressed creatures 
they are—every feather always in place, 
their crest always brushed up a la pompa- 
dour, not a speck of dust on their sleek blue 
coats. But, beautiful as they are, they are 
always scolding about some real or imagin- 
ary wrong. They remind me of a beautifully 
dressed but saucy maiden, with a sharp 
tongue and a _ high-pitched, unmelodious 
voice. One can love a bluebird, modest yet 
friendly, with a sweet tongue which she does 


[72] 





OUT OF DOORS IN THE AUTUMN 


not use too much, but who can love a blue 
jay? 

Neither have the crows lost their voices. 
Three or four of them have just come over 
to my willow as I write, “winnowing their 
slow way through the air.”’ I think the little 
flock consists of a father and a mother and 
two children, for the voices of the young 
ones are as different from their parents’ as 
a young rooster just beginning to crow is dif- 
ferent from old Father Chanticleer: ‘They 
all landed in the willow before they saw me 
sitting beneath it. Then how they did scold, 
father, mother, John, and Mary! ‘Caw, 
caw, caw! Go away, away, away. This is 
my tree. What are you doing here?’ But 
I held my ground despite their scolding, and 
soon they flew to another tree several rods 
away; and—would you believe it?—when 
they had settled down to a family conclave, 
their voices changed to a quiet, conversa- 
tional tone, almost a cooing note. I had never 
listened to crows talking together before, or 
heard any but their jarring, rough, raucous 
voices. My respect for the whole tribe rose 
after hearing this little family conversation, 
even though I knew they had just been steal- 
ing my ripe corn. 

The red squirrel that in the spring I had 

[73] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


seen coming down the grapevine ladder for a 
drink in the pond came again today. He, 
too, like the crows, resented my presence, 
and chattered something like, ‘‘Get out of 
here; get out of here.’ But even he was not 
so vocal as in the spring, when he had his 
fight with the catbird. I did not move in 
spite of his protests, and he soon departed 
for my cornfield which the crows had left. 

There is still another creature that has not 
lost her voice in these autumn days, and that 
is the chickadee. Dear little symphony in 
black and white, how cheerful and optimistic 
you always are! In the coldest winter 
weather you never forget your one little song 
or your friendly good nature. You will 
perch even on a snow-covered twig, just be- 
yond the reach of my hand, and never seem 
to get cold feet. Anyway, if you do, they 
never make you grouchy. I must very soon 
fill my suet cage for you. I am going to re- 
member you at Thanksgiving time as one 
cause for gratitude. You are well worth it. 

But before Thanksgiving Day most of the 
chickadees’ feathered companions will have 
sailed southward on their individual aero- 
planes. They are already gathering to- 
gether in large flocks, for, like the war 
fliers, they prefer to go in squadrons. To be 


[74] 


OUT OF DOORS IN THE AUTUMN 


sure, the chickadees will stay all winter, and 
the blue jays and the crows, and an occasional 
robin and flicker; but most of my winged 
friends will not much longer haunt the willow 
pond. Some will go to South Carolina and 
Florida; others, without passports or bag- 
gage, will cross the international boundary 
to Mexico and Costa Rica, while others will 
fly still farther and settle on the slopes of 
tiesandes.» It is a far cry trom Cape Cod 
to Capricornus, but you will make it safely, 
I doubt not. God be with you till we meet 
again; and, when you come back in the spring 
I hope to be here to meet you. How I wish 
you could tell us of your wonderful journeys 
and the strange things you have seen and the 
people you have met! Yours would indeed 
be a traveler’s tale worth hearing. 


[75] 


CHAPTER X 
A RAINY DAY AT THE FARM 


It is very fortunate that all days are not 
“brite and fare,’’ or else we should miss the 
peculiar joys of the rainy day at the farm. 

We draw up the blinds in the morning for 
the first glimpse of out of doors. Good, it 
gives promise of a long, rainy day. The 
clouds are of that unbroken, somber gray 
that allows no peephole for the sun. It is 
not yet raining, but the weatherwise will wet 
his finger, and thrust it out to see from what 
quarter the wind blows. Good, again; it is 
from the northeast, for both Boreas and 
Pluvius have a liking for that quarter. And, 
listen! can you not hear a faint rumble from 
the direction of the sea? It is not pro- 
nounced enough yet to be called a roar, the 
breaking waves are not yet dashing high, 
but the wind is beginning to raise the white- 
caps, and soon the long slow boom of the sea 
will add its music to the soughing of the 
pine trees. There is no hurry about taking 
it all in at once. It will not be a rainy hour 
but a rainy day, perhaps two or three days, 


[76] 


A RAINY DAY AT THE FARM 


and one can enjoy it slowly without fear of 
missing anything. 

The first duty, if we must have duties on 
rainy days, is to see if there are dry logs 
enough beside the big fireplace to last forty- 
eight hours, without stinting ourselves of a 
single cheerful tongue of flame. Not quite 
enough, and so, before the rain comes down 
heavily, we will stagger in under half a dozen 
logs, one at a time, each one of which is all 
we want to handle. The old fireplace has a 
capacious and insatiable maw. Have I men- 
tioned that its mouth is seven feet wide at 
the front and four feet wide at the back—its 
gullet, so to speak? It could take in half a 
cord of wood at a time if we wished to be 
extravagant. And indeed we need not be 
sparing, for we are rich in scrub pines and 
oaks, and old, decrepit apple trees. The 
former need to be thinned out, and the latter 
to be chopped down, and John hasn’t much 
else to do in midwinter, so he provides a good 
store. Moreover, we are depriving no one 
else of fuel in these shivering days of high 
prices, since transportation from the old 
farm would cost more than the wood is 
worth. So we can pile on the logs with a 
good conscience, only being careful not to 
put on so many as to roast us out of house 


[77] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


and home, and drive us away from the ruddy 
blaze. 

Of course there are other fireplaces in the 
farmhouse, four of them, to say nothing of 
a fifth which vandal hands once bricked up, 
but they are only little three-foot affairs that 
take stovewood. ‘They are well enough for 
an hour on a chilly morning, but are not to 
be thought of for a long, rainy day. 

There are not coals enough in the ashes 
of last night’s fire to start a blaze, so we will 
use the ‘Cape Cod Fire Lighter.” ‘This, as 
is well known, is a piece of porous stone on 
a stiff wire handle, kept when not in use in 
a bright brass pot half full of kerosene oil. 
The stone holds the oil for ten minutes after 
it is lighted, a sufficient time to set fire to the 
toughest old logs, if a few soft wood sticks 
are at the bottom. The more orthodox way 
of lighting the fire would be to whittle up 
some shavings, lay them deftly under the big 
sticks with enough open spaces to supply them 
with oxygen, then rake a coal out of the ashes 
and Jet nature do the rest. But we have to 
make some concessions to modern life, even 
in the old farmhouse—hence the Cape Cod 
Fire Lighter. 

Now the rain begins to come down in 
earnest, not like a summer shower in big, 


[78] 


A RAINY DAY AT THE FARM 


driving drops from a black thunder-cloud, 
but steadily, from a leaden sky, as though it 
meant business and intended to keep at it all 
day. As the drops chase each other down the 
window panes the blaze, which has now 
seized firm hold of the big logs, goes in the 
other direction, and mounts higher and 
higher in the big chimney. It roars and crack- 
les and leaps up as though glad to be free 
of earthly shackles. Perhaps it is the spirit 
of the wood, which has been bark-bound for 
fifty years, drenched with sap, and held down 
by fibrous tendons for two or three gen- 
erations, and is mighty glad to get into the 
free air once more. 

It may be something like this with our own 
spirits, one of these days, when at last they 
are free from the bonds of “earth and sense.” 
I can easily imagine it of the martyrs who 
have gone up from the stake in a chariot of 
fire—John Huss, Jerome of Prague, Lati- 
mer, and Tyndale, and perhaps many a poor 
Negro, horribly lynched for a crime he never 
committed. What is that hymn we used to 
sing to a swinging tune? 

‘Rivers to the ocean run, 
Nor stay in all their course; 
Fire ascending seeks the sun 
Both speed them ‘to their source. 


[79] 





THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 





So my soul, derived from God, 
Pants to view His glorious face, 
Upward tends to His abode, 
To rest in His embrace.” 


How easy it is on a rainy day before a big 
fire to drop into poetry, like Mr. Wegg—not 
original, of course, but acquired in childhood. 

We are not afraid of a roaring blaze in 
the old fireplace. The house is insured, that’s 
one comfort, and it is doubly insured by the 
heavy rain on the roof, which would kill any 
sparks as soon as they touch it. At any rate 
we remember with satisfaction that the house 
has stood for two hundred and thirty years 
and has never yet burned down; that, un- 
doubtedly, thousands of cords of wood have 
gone up in that old chimney in smoke and 
flame; and that, in all probability, there have 
been far more reckless firebuilders than we in 
the seven generations that have warmed 
themselves at that hearth. We trust the old 
chimney. 

How many methods of producing light 
and heat have come and gone since the first 
blaze lighted up that chimney, before George 
Washington or Ben Franklin was born! 
First the flint and steel and tinder, or per- 
haps the friction of the pointed stick, twisted 


[80] 


A RAINY DAY AT THE FARM 


Indian fashion, which the Boy Scouts are so 
proud of making today. Then the live coal, 
carefully covered up in the ashes or borrowed 
from the nearest neighbor if our own farm- 
house coals had lost their glow during the 
night. Many a frosty morning, I warrant, 
little John or Jane ran over to Neighbor 
Crowell or to Neighbor Swift to “borrow 
some fire.” Not a few people now living re- 
member when that was a common practice. 
Then came the old, smelly lucifer match— 
the very name as well as the smell suggesting 
the lower regions—and the tallow candle 
made by hand by dipping. Then the whale- 
oil lamp without a chimney, smoky and dull; 
then the first rude kerosene lamp, then gas, 
then the electric light, and the Cape Cod Fire 
Lighter. 

Gas and electricity the old farmhouse has 
never known. It would seem almost a dese- 
cration to introduce them. But fire and light 
were the same glorious boons before any of 
these new contraptions for making them 
were invented, and the ruddy blaze warmed 
the knotty knuckles of the first farmer who 
built my house, and lit up the rosy faces of 
the little towheads who gathered around the 
fireplace, quite as well as in these sophisti- 
cated days. 


[81] 





THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


The fire is so interesting that I had almost 
forgotten the rain, but that is as charming in 
its own way; at least the sense of contrast 
between the howling storm outside—for it 
has begun to howl—and the peace and 
warmth within has all the elements of quiet 
joy. I go to the door, but do not care to 
stick my head out too far—just far enough 
to get a splash of rain in my face, to teach 
me what I do not need to face. 

I listen to the boom of the breakers on the 
shore, half a mile away—for they have be- 
gun to boom in good earnest now—and I[ 
offer a silent prayer “‘for those in peril on the 
sea’’ and think of the many times I have 
paced a steamer’s deck in just such a gale, 
or heard the waves dash against my state- 
room port with an awful smash, as though 
they would surely break through, while the 
big ship shook and shivered with the shock. 
But storm warnings have been up all along 
the coast for twenty-four hours, the papers 
have predicted this storm, and few if any 
mariners in frail ships will be caught in it. 
So I can enjoy the storm, without too many 
compassionate thoughts to dull my pleasure. 

From the east window I can see the white 
rollers dashing over the breakwater of the 
Cape Cod Canal, as it juts out into the big 


[82] 


A RAINY DAY AT THE FARM 


bay. It is like a great gleam of flashing light 
on the angry coast that comes and goes with 
every wave. 

There is not much life outdoors on the 
farm today. Irene, the Jersey cow, and 
Imogene, the Angora goat, are in their snug 
houses, for though they can stand a gentle 
rain and rather like it, they have no stomach 
for anortheaster. Onesima, the big pig (the 
Bible will tell you why a good lady gave her 
this name), with her little litter, is under 
shelter and so are the hens, for they have no 
relish for wet feathers, not being well 
oiled like their neighbors the ducks who 
revel in such weather. Beauty and Jack, 
the two St. Bernard dogs, came to the 
kitchen door for their morning dog biscuit, 
but they soon turned tail and sought their 
kennels, while Tabitha, the cat, never would 
put her dainty paw out of doors on such a 
day as this and much prefers the braided rug 
in front of the fire. 

Later in the morning Portuguese John 
in oilskins and sou’-wester comes with the 
Boston Herald—but who wants to read of 
Presidents and cabinets and leagues and 
treaties and New York and New Haven 
stocks on such a day? Let it stay in its 
wrapper for once. 


[83] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


I will go into the library—it was the best 
parlor in the original days, with beautiful 
hand-carving around the windows and 
mantelpiece—and choose a book. What 
shall I choose? My modest literary riches 
embarrass me. Shall it be ‘The ‘empest,” 
writ by a certain W. Shakespeare, who didn’t 
know how to spell, and could scarcely write 
his name legibly? I think not. The tempest 
is out of doors, and I will read it from the 
window. 

One book isn’t enough for such a day. | 
will take two or three. One shall be a copy 
of Bushnell’s sermons, a superb book, for I 
feel in a serious though happy mood, and a 
good sermon isn’t such dry, tough reading as 
most people suppose. I will take, too, ‘“The 
Anatomy of Melancholy,” one of the least 
melancholy of books, for it, too, well fits into 
the mood of the day, and also one of Archi- 
bald Marshall’s tranquil but absorbing 
novels. It will be either ‘“The Greatest of 
These,” or ‘“The Honor of the Clintons.” 
I won’t touch ‘Sir Harry,” for I am tired 
of war books and war stories. Dear authors, 
give us a rest from blood and carnage! 

I shall not read all of these books, per- 
haps not any of them, but I like to have them 
by me. So I will take them all out, and 


[84] 


A RAINY DAY AT THE FARM 


wheel the big green plush chair—which some 
little children call “Grandpa’s chair’—in 
front of the fire, and pile the books up on the 
rug at my feet. Yet I presume that I shall 
read the book in the flames most of the time, 
as they leap and flare and die down, and the 
white ashes decorate the charred sticks with 
delicate lace, until I pile on more wood. As 
Lizzie Hexam in “Our Mutual Friend” used 
to read to her brother Charlie the fire stories 
in the “‘hollow down by the flare,” so I can 
read my own books there, more beautiful 
than any printed page. Why bother with 
Bushnell or Burton or Marshall today, good 
as they all are? 

I wish all my children and grandchildren 
were here to enjoy the rainy day with me. 
It would be a noisier, merrier day, but busi- 
ness and school keep them all away at this 
time of the year. Only one other is in the 
old house, and she has been with me for many 
a pleasant and many a rainy day, for four 
and forty years. People will persist in call- 
ing us “elderly,” though it is hard to tell why, 
when we feel almost as youthful as we did 
four times ten years ago, and four more 
added. 

No outsider comes in to cook the simple 
meals. We draw a little table up in front of 


[85] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


the fire, wheel the one-course dinner (no 
table d’hote) in from the kitchen on the 
tea wagon, toast our bread before the glow- 
ing coals, and, with plenty of Irene’s clotted 
cream and yellowest butter, have all that 
heart can wish. In memory of the former 
days, and to remind the old fireplace of what 
so often happened there a hundred years ago 
and more, we pop some corn over the coals 
and roast some apples on the hearth, and then 
play a game of Colorito—a complicated but 
interesting game with counters for two. We 
will also have some reading aloud, which we 
both greatly enjoy. 

All this is after the blackness of a fall 
evening has shut out the rain and tossing 
trees and breakers, and has shut us in to quiet 
peace and to each other. As we go up to 
bed in the great square room overhead (no 
stived-up seven-by-nine bedroom for our an- 
cestors!) the rain is still pattering upon the 
roof and dashing against the windows—the 
sweetest of all lullabys. 

In my school days the more or less mushy 
boys and girls used to write in each other’s 
albums such sentiments as this: 


“Into each life some rain must fall, 
Some days must be dark and dreary.” 


[86] 


A RAINY DAY AT THE FARM 


I am glad some rainy days have been my lot. 
They have been far from “‘sad and dreary.” 
Indeed, at the close of such a day I can say, 
“Thank God for the rain and ‘stormy wind 
fulfilling his word.’”’ Indeed, I have come 
to ‘‘the end of a perfect day.” 


[87] 


CHAPTER XI 
THE UNDERGROUND ALCHEMIST 


Another cold, hard winter has come and 
gone, and here I am, sitting once more un- 
der the big willow beside the little pond in 
the “sunken orchard.” Not that the or- 
chard itself ever sank; but my predecessors, 
a hundred years ago or so, took advantage 
of one of the innumerable hollows of Cape 
Cod, scooped out by the glaciers in prehis- 
toric times, and planted here some Baldwins 
and Porters and Russets and one or two de- 
licious summer apple trees whose names I 
do not know. The trees are very aged and 
enarled, and some of them are decrepit; but, 
like the righteous man, they “‘still bring forth 
fruit in old age,” even if they are not fat 
and flourishing. 

As I write, the leaves on these old vet- 
erans are about the size of a mouse’s ears, 
which shows me that it is time to plant corn. 
By the way, I see that a controversy on this 
question is raging in the daily paper I take. 
One correspondent says the time to plant 
corn is when the maple leaves are as big as 


[88] 





THE UNDERGROUND ALCHEMIST 


a mouse’s ears. Another says that is too 
soon, and that we must wait till the ash leaves 
are of that peculiar size. Still another writes 
that both are wrong, and that oak leaves, 
the latest of all, must measure up with a 
mouse’s external auditory organ before it is 
safe to plant corn. I shall, perhaps, rashly 
differ from them all, and stick to my old 
apple trees to tell me when to plant the sweet 
maize which all good Americans love. As 
I sit here, the young willow leaves afford 
just shade enough, but not too much, while 
the warm May sun, flickering through the 
mouse-ears of the apple trees, dapples the 
sides of the sunken orchard; and I am “‘lost 
in wonder and amaze’’ at the strange things 
that are going on underground in this spring- 
time. | 
Talk about alchemy and the transmutation 
of metals! The old alchemists couldn’t hold 
a candle to this unseen alchemist of spring- 
time, even if they had been able to change all 
the baser metals of the world into gold and 
silver. ‘Think of it! Something is taking 
place out of sight in the brown earth beneath 
the grass that will transmute the elements in 
the soil and air and rain into ten thousand 
different products. The roots of the apple 
trees will suck uv certain juices and minerals 


[89] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


and transform them into leaves and blos- 
soms, and, after awhile, into fruit. I see a 
white pine growing beside the apple trees, 
and that will get something else from the 
same soil and air and rain. It will never 
grow an apple, but resinous pine needles, 
sweet and fragrant. On this side of the little 
pond is the big willow under which I am sit- 
ting, and to which I have before introduced 
my readers: It will always find willow food, 
but never any apple juice or resin, though 
its roots must almost intertwine themselves 
with the pine’s and the apple’s not fifty feet 
away. 

Festooned from branches of the willow is 
a big grapevine, planted no one knows when; 
for it bears a delicious fruit unlike any mod- 
ern grapes that the nurserymen sell. Its 
roots are now feeling about in the spring soil, 
saying to Mother Earth: “I want some 
grape substance. Don’t give me willow food 
or pine-tree stuff, but that juicy, flavorsome 
combination which you have furnished me 
every spring for the last fifty years, so that 
I can hang my purple clusters on the willow 
branch next September.” Mother Nature 
hears the grapevine’s plea, and furnishes the 
ingredients for which it asks. 

Ten feet away on the edge of the pond are 


[90] 





THE UNDERGROUND ALCHEMIST 





a dozen black alder bushes, and they want 
something different still; for they expect to 
bear no apples or grapes or resinous cones, 
and they do not wish to reach out their arms 
like the willow in every direction. ‘Chey wish 
only to grow about ten feet high and to bear 
clusters of white blossoms and no end of 
berries, which the robins and catbirds will 
be so glad to get just before they fly away 
in the autumn. 

But here is a still more wonderful thing 
that the underground alchemist is at work on 
during these spring days. He is planning to 
give a different flavor to each of my varieties 
of apples and a different color to their skins. 
How vast a number of pigments and essences 
he must have in his secret cupboards! Over 
there is a big Porter apple tree. Its oblong, 
rather daintily shaped fruits must have a yel- 
low skin and a spicy and rather tart flavor. 
A Baldwin tree stands next to the Porter, 
Dame Nature, and you must see to it that its 
apples are rounder than the Porter, with a 
deep-red blush on both cheeks, and a sweeter 
taste, which I cannot describe exactly, except 
that it is a Baldwin-apple taste. There, only 
two rods farther off, is a Golden Russet. Be 
careful, O Underground Alchemist, not to 
get your flavors or colors mixed; for I ex- 


[91] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


pect my Russets to have the lovely, velvety 
brown skin, and the exact, old-fashioned 
Russety taste, when I come to eat them next 
April; for a Russet isn’t really good until six 
months after it has been picked. 

There is another point which the alchemist 
never forgets, and that is to put a different 
time limit to each kind of apple; for we can’t 
have them ready to eat all at once, lest some 
of them spoil. The Summer Harvests, which 
I forgot to mention, must have still a difter- 
ent color and flavor scheme from all the oth- 
ers, must be ready to eat in August; and Por- 
ters must be in their prime in September. 
Baldwins may be eatable in November, but 
will be better still in January; and as for 
Russets, I will barrel them up and not touch 
them until March at the earliest. So it would 
be a great mistake if things got mixed in our 
underground laboratory, and if I should find 
my Summer Harvests hard as rocks in Au- 
gust and my Russets half rotten in Septem- 
ber. 

I am wondering, as I sit here under the 
willow, whether each man or woman was 
not meant by the Creator to have a flavor 
and color of his or her own. Some of us, I 
believe, were meant to be unusually spicy and 
some unusually sweet. Alas! Some of us 


[92] 


THE UNDERGROUND ALCHEMIST 


are sour and some are knurly; but I do not 
think Providence designed that. Somehow 
we have extracted the wrong juices from 
life’s experiences, and have turned what was 
meant to be a pleasant flavor, free from in- 
sipidity, into an acrid tartness. Just here we 
differ from the apple tree, and can pick and 
choose, at least to a limited extent, what 
our flavor shall be. I have known some peo- 
ple who sweetened and mellowed as they 
grew older, and others that soured and be- 
came more and more crab-apple like. Still, 
to a very considerable extent our native Juices 
make us what we are, and it is the part of 
wisdom to develop along Nature’s, that is 
God’s, lines. If you are a red Baldwin, young 
friend, don’t try to become a yellow Porter, 
but seek to be a flavorsome Baldwin of the 
very best kind. Many a good, honest Rus- 
set has spoiled himself in trying to become a 
Lady’s Finger or a Northern Spy. 

Neither let us become impatient with God 
and ourselves if we mature slowly. Some 
people are brilliant in their early days, the 
admired of all admirers, sprightly, popular, 
precocious; and sometimes these same peo- 
ple, like a very early apple, are rotten almost 
before they are ripe. Then there are others 
who do not reach their best estate, like my 


[93] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


Russets, until the frosts of winter whiten 
their hair. This thought is a real comfort 
for us slow developing folk. If we abide 
our time, we may yet justify the Giver of 
every good and perfect gift, even if these 
gifts are exasperatingly slow in developing. 

But a truce to further moralizing. If each 
of us has a flavor and a color of his own, and 
a time of full maturity, as I believe we have, 
let us take courage, thank God, and make 
the most of these inherited gifts, remember- 
ing that our roots stretch out to another 
world, and reach into eternity; and “it doth 
not yet appear what we shall be.” 


[94] 


CHAPTER XII 
FUN ON THE OLD FARM 


I think we shall agree substantially that 
fun is not all of the boisterous, rollicking 
kind that ends in a guftaw, but may also be of 
the gentler sort that brings a smile to the lips 
and a glow to the heart. I do not by any 
means despise the former; but the fun on my 
small farm is for the most part of the latter 
kind, and is of a sort in which birds and 
beasts, things animate and inanimate, may 
join. 

As I step out of the old farmhouse door, 
I can almost detect a grimace in the con- 
torted, twisted limbs of the ancient apple 
trees that have been blown upon by the seven 
winds of heaven for a century; for I have 
spared some of them just because they are so 
gaunt and gnarled, though I have little hope ~ 
of future fair Baldwins or Greenings. Even 
in their winter bareness they seem to be 
laughing at the wild winds, as much as to say: 
‘“We are too much for you, old Boreas. You 
can’t uproot us if you do your worst. You 
may twist us and blow us out of shape; but, 


[95] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


old as we are, we can defy you still, as we 
did when we were young, a hundred years 
ago.” It is not in the winter, however, but 
in the spring that Nature is in her jolliest 
mood. ‘Then every new spear of grass and 
unfolding bud says: ‘‘Why, here I am, as 
fresh and sweet as ever. ‘The ice didn’t 
freeze my veins, and the snow was a warm 
coverlet, and I have had such a good, long 
sleep that I have waked up in the happiest 
possible frame of mind, and am good for at 
least six months of joyous life.” 

It will be seen from this that I am not a 
gentleman farmer, with a great estate over 
which I ride once in a while, and leave all 
the real work to my underlings. I cannot 
think there would be great fun in this. No, 
I like to take hold with my swarthy helper 
and plant and spray and trim and prune. 
To be sure, he does more than his share of 
the rough work, and much of the year I must 
be cultivating other kinds of fields than those 
that grow cabbages and turnips; but the fun 
of farming comes from being a real farmer 
while you are one, getting close to the soil, 
becoming intimate with every living thing, 
whether it be a plant or an animal, loving 
your tomato-vines and_ raspberry-bushes, 
taking a real pride in your eggplants and in 


[96] 





FUN ON THE OLD FARM 


your Brussels sprouts, whether you get a 
prize for them at the county fair or not. 

Then there is the fun of trying new ex- 
periments. I never lose my faith in the an- 
nual seed catalogue in spite of divers and 
sundry disappointments. With new zest 
every year, as I have already said, I read of 
those wonderful strawberries, one of which 
would fill a tumbler, and the ever-bearing 
raspberries that are in fruit from June to 
December, and the mammoth squashes which 
only a Hercules can lift. I am very sure to 
try some of them and get any amount of fun 
out of my anticipations of similar results. 
No matter if the realization falls far short 
of the picture in the gorgeous catalogue. I 
lay the results to my poorer soil, or lack of 
skill in cultivation, and have just as much 
confidence in the novelties which next year’s 
spring catalogue exploits as the “‘very largest, 
richest, juiciest, most melting (always a fa- 
vorite word) fruit in the world.” I would 
not lose my faith in the seed and fruit cata- 
logues for all the squashes and raspberries 
that grow. 

But there are some unusual things which 
one can always do on a farm, which relieve 
the monotony, if one finds any, in beans, corn, 
potatoes, and cabbages; and variety is not 


[97] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


only the spice of life, but the soul of fun on 
the farm. You can, for instance, raise pea- 
nuts anywhere in the east—not large crops, 
to be sure, but a little experimental patch; 
and yet not one person in a hundred north of 
Mason and Dixon’s line ever saw the delicate 
peanut vine and its pretty yellow blossoms. 
The same can be said of the sweet potato, 
whose foliage is lovely, and of the okra, with 
its beautiful flowers that would reward you 
for your pains if you did not care for chicken 
and gumbo soup. There are a dozen other 
vegetables and a score of flowers which, 
though common enough elsewhere, are sel- 
dom raised in your vicinity, and watching 
whose development will afford interest and 
pleasure the whole summer long. 

Then there are freaks in the ordinary 
vegetable and flower world that add not a 
little to the fun of farming. For instance, 
last summer I saw that one specimen of 
kohl-rabi on my farm gave evidence of out- 
doing all his brethren in size. So I did not 
pluck him in his green and succulent state, 
but bade him do his best. He grew all sum- 
mer long until he became a very Daniel Lam- 
bert among his fellows. His sides bulged 
like a balloon; his very eyes stood out with 
fatness, as the Scriptures say of the wicked 


[98] 





FUN ON THE OLD FARM 


man; and I could imagine the other vegeta- 
bles pointing the finger of derision at him, 
and calling him “Old Fatty,” and “Tubby,” 
and like opprobrious names. ‘The Chinese 
must have a sense of humor, I think, since 
they prefer to have their ginseng roots, by 
which they set so much store as a medicine, 
in the form of a man, with two legs, two 
arms, and a round bullet head, as it some- 
times grows. Such roots, I understand, bring 
five times as much in the market as ordinary 
ginseng tubers. What other extreme value 
can they have except an appeal to the Orien- 
tal sense of humor? 

When it comes to flowers, how good a time 
one can have on a small farm in watching the 
development of odd shapes and colors! Scat- 
ter a handful of portulacca seeds in the soil, 
and you can no more count the colors and 
tints which this sun-loving flower presents 
than you can count the shades in a glorious 
sunset sky. Bury some dahlia bulbs in the 
spring, and by midsummer you will have a 
score of shades, single and double, fringed 
and plain, small and big, and a hundred dif- 
ferent colors as well. 

Oh, there is always something new on 
the small farm. Its infinite variety largely 
adds to my pleasure. It is never stale nor 


[99] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


monotonous. It never repeats itself. Every 
morning in summer I go out with eager an- 
ticipation to see what new development the 
new day has brought, what new green shoot 
has pierced the brown soil, what new bud has 
opened, what new fruit has begun to ripen, 
what new flavor my melon vines have yielded, 
what new odor comes from the flower bed. 
The Psalmist’s words are as true of all living 
things as they are of the heavens: 


‘Day unto day uttereth speech, 
And night unto night showeth knowledge. 
There is no speech nor language; 
Their voice is not heard. 
Their line is gone out through all the earth, 
And their words to the end of the world.” 


And then the animal life on my small 
farm! It is as much fun as a menagerie. 
Every morning the big woodpecker wakes me 
up at sunrise, or a little before. ‘Tap, tap, 
tap,” he calls on the old shingles, searching 
for the insects that are hiding beneath. 
“Tap, tap, tap, you lazy fellow,” he says. 
‘The sun is up; why are not you? I have 
been awake since dawn, getting grubs for my 
little ones. Get up, get up, get up.” I obey 
his summons, and watch him fly down from 
the roof and disappear in the round hole that 


[100] 


FUN ON THE OLD FARM 


he has drilled in a rotten old apple tree which 
I have left standing for his benefit. Of 
Giotto, the famous builder of the beautiful 
cathedral and campanile in Florence, it was 
said that his work was as perfect as the 
round ‘‘o” in Giotto. ‘The same can be said 
of the work of my friends, Mr. and Mrs. 
Yellowhammer, or Mr. and Mrs. Highhole, 
or Mr. and Mrs. Flicker, by whichever name 
you care to call them. The hole they have 
made is as round as the “o” in Giotto. It 
could not be a more exact circle. I cannot 
quite put my hand in, but I know the cavity 
is full of their offspring; for when I tap on 
the bark and put my ear close to the hole 
I hear a hissing sound, as tense and sibilant 
as though a whole crowd of gallery gods was 
trying to drive an actor off the stage. 

After a while a great, fat, goggle-eyed 
youngster will come to the hole, filling it up 
completely, and, like an “end-seat hog” in 
the street-car, preventing any of the others 
of the brood from crowding by or coming 
to the front. But he dares not leave his natal 
hole in the apple tree yet. His wings are 
weak and untried. In a few days, however, 
when I go to visit him again, he is not there. 
Suddenly he mustered up courage to try his 
unused powers; and a quick dart from the 


[101] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


big apple tree, a gleam of mottled yellow, a 
flicker through the light and shade of the 
orchard, and he is gone. I hope he will come 
again next year to hammer on the roof of 
the old farmhouse, to wake me up as his 
father and mother did this year. 

As for my domestic animals, they are of 
all degrees of humor. Of course, my collie 
puppy is just a bundle of fun and good nature 
and awkward gambols. He seems fuddled 
with animal spirits. As for my cow, I can’t 
see that she has any sense of humor at all. 
If I stroke her nose, or rub her back, or give 
her a choice cabbage leaf, she takes it all as 
a matter of course, as though it was her due. 
She has no smile of recognition and no 
‘Thank you, sir,” for me. My pig grunts 
his thanks as plainly as can be, and there is 
a twinkle in his eye that says, ““My gratitude 
is exactly proportioned to the number of ears 
of corn you gave me.” 

The two geese, Hero and Leander, that 
live in the little pond—-Leander swam the 
Hellespont, you know, “‘for to see his dear”’ 
—are too much engrossed with their own 
self-importance to have any time ever to look 
on the kindly, humorous side of life. Like 
some men I know, they go through life with- 
out once suspecting how ridiculous they are, 


[102] 


FUN ON THE OLD FARM 


so wrapped up are they in their own self- 
conceit. They waddle around side by side, 
never suspecting, apparently, that they have 
not the most graceful gait in the world. This 
I will say for them, however; they are a most 
devoted pair. No husband and wife were 
ever more true to each other. “I will never 
desert Mr. Micawber,’’ Hero seems to be 
constantly saying, while as for Leander, he 
is certainly always waiting for something 
to turn up in the way of a grasshopper or a 
feed of corn. My ducks are much more lively 
and humorous than the geese. Nothing 
pleases them so much as to pick a choice mor- 
sel right out from under the noses of Hero 
and Leander, and then waddle off at twice 
the speed the geese can make, and splash into 
the water, with a “Quack, quack, quack,” 
which I can interpret as meaning, ‘You didn’t 
catch me that time, old slow-coach, did you ?”’ 

As for the hens, they are unconscious hu- 
morists. They are always funny, but they 
never know it. George Fitch once said that 
a hen will run twenty-five yards for the sake 
of crossing a road in front of an automobile, 
when she never wished to go across until she 
saw the auto coming. My hens often run 
off with a piece of string or paper that hap- 
pens to be in their feed, apparently for the 


[103] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


sake of fooling the other hens and making 
them run violently after the possessor of the 
string. I have sometimes thought that this 
shows a tendency toward practical joking; 
but, on the whole, I am inclined to think that 
a hen isn’t bright enough for that, and that 
this is only another illustration of the fact 
that she is funny without meaning to be. 

Who would ever go to a movie or a vaude- 
ville show when he could have so much 
higher class fun on a small farm? 


[104] 


CHAPTER XIII 


ALWAYS SOMETHING NEW ON 
THE OLD FARM 


The charm of the old farm is perennial. 
It always has something new to offer. There 
is scarcely a day of the three hundred and 
sixty-five and a quarter, that I do not find 
something to look at that I never saw be- 
fore. To be sure, a few rough and icy days 
in winter may seem to furnish an exception 
to this rule, but even then wonderful new 
patterns of ferns and arabesque tracery of 
all sorts are drawn on the window panes. I 
like to go down cellar, even on the coldest 
days, to see if the winter weather has not 
added a new flavor to my Baldwins and a 
new mellowness to my Russets. If these ma- 
terial good things should fail of novelty, the 
farmhouse library has untold treasures, so 
old that they are new to most people of this 
generation. 

But with the first breath of spring come the 
new things that I have chiefly in mind. There 
is the rhubarb patch, tart reminder that even 
the sourest experience of life can be so sweet- 


(1054 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


ened as to become delicious and refreshing. 
A bulbous sign of coming stalks breaks 
ground even in March, when there is scarcely 
another green thing to welcome it. ‘The next 
day a tinge of red shows itself; the day after, 
the big bud unfolds and, almost before I 
know it, a great leaf as big as an elephant’s 
ear is inviting me to pick, stew, and abun- 
dantly sugar the juicy stem that upholds it. 

The asparagus bed lies next to the rhu- 
barb, and is its close rival for an early resur- 
rection. One morning I scan the old bed. 
Surely that is the spot where I plucked the 
luscious stalks last year. But it gives no sign 
of life. ‘I must wait another week,” I say 
to myself. However, as I stroll by the next 
day, there is my first Palmetto, with its head 
neatly overlaid with scales like a soldier’s 
helmet to enable it the better to push its way 
through the hard soil. And there is another, 
and another, and another. If I were a woman 
I believe I would take my knitting and sit 
down and see the asparagus grow, for to- 
morrow morning those shoots will be six 
inches high and twice as big around as they 
are today. Being a man, and having nothing 
to occupy my hands, I can only wait until to- 
morrow morning comes to pluck the ‘‘grass’’ 
for dinner. 


[106] 


ALWAYS SOMETHING NEW ON THE OLD FARM 


Then follows a quick succession of novel- 
ties, morning after morning. Indeed, I have 
to go over my farm twice a day to keep up 
with them. As the buds begin to swell, the 
plum trees and the cherries are running a 
race. One day I think one of the rivals is 
ahead, and then the other. At last the plum 
trees win out, but only by a lap. At least 
they do in Japan, and I think it is true also 
of most American plums. First a few ad- 
venturous buds unfold, and then suddenly 
one morning I draw up the shade of my east 
window to see if it is likely to be a “pretty 
day,” as they say in the south, and lo! my 
plum trees are all huge bouquets. If it were 
a little earlier, I would think they were cov- 
ered with snow. The pear trees lag a little 
behind the plums, but not much. In fact, the 
Duchess and Bartlett are out before the 
petals fall from the Abundance and the Bur- 
banks. They stand up straight and perky on 
their stiff twigs, as though they would say 
to the sprawling, lopsided Japanese plums, 
‘“T’m not much behind you, and at any rate 
I am much more trim and symmetrical.” 

Then the apple trees, as though spurred 
on by their more forward brethren, begin to 
blush at being such laggards, and almost be- 
fore we know it they are all ablaze with 


[107] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


bloom, and make up for any dilatoriness by 
offering the most magnificent spectacle that 
the whole orchard affords. I envy the man 
who never saw a great apple tree in blossom 
and who has that sensation in store. Suppose 
he had seen nothing but tropical vegetation 
all his life, and some day, having just landed 
in the night from some equatorial port, 
should open his eyes the next morning on a 
New England or an Oregon apple orchard 
in May—every tree one great mass of pink 
and white! What would he say? Unless 
pride of country and climate kept him quiet, 
I think he would say, ‘‘This is the rarest 
flower in the world, and I would give all my 
orange blossoms and my gorgeous bougain- 
villias and poinsettias for this one apple or- 
chard.’’ And yet we berate the barrenness 
and sterility of our northern climes, and long 
for the glories of the colorful south! 

The beauties of the trees, however, shall 
not blind my eyes to the small new things 
that, following the apple blossoms, peep 
shyly from the brown earth. ‘Those potatoes 
that I planted in April were most unprom- 
ising looking slabs of inert material. But 
they seem to know that they must help feed 
the nations and make the world safe for 
Democracy; and one morning, a fortnight 


[108] 


ALWAYS SOMETHING NEW ON THE OLD FARM 


after, I find row after row of little new 
leaves forcing their way up into the sunlight. 
Few things are more wonderful than the way 
Nature, the oldest of alchemists, transmutes 
an inert, lifeless mass of starch and protein 
into a delicate, tender plant, which the po- 
tato bugs, at least, think is most succulent. 
We wonder at the butterfly coming from the 
chrysalis which the dying worm spins for his 
winding sheet, but that is not a bit more 
remarkable than the transmutation of half 
a decrepit old potato into a bushy plant, 
with a whole family of delicious young tubers 
clustering about its roots. 

Indeed, there is something delightfully 
and surprisingly new about every young 
thing, whether it is a plant or a baby. The 
beans pushing their twin cotyledons above the 
soil, the corn urging his spear into the sun- 
light, the melon peering timidly above the 
soil as though afraid of a frost or a cutworm 
—each has its own special charm and each 
gives me something new to watch for, every 
bright spring morning. 

And not only does inanimate nature fur- 
nish my farm with novelties—I take the 
word back, I will not reproach my potatoes 
and beans with being inanimate. ‘They are 
not without animus. How sadly that word 


[109] 





THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


has degenerated in our English use! At least, 
the One who makes them grow is not mind- 
less, and He seems to have put something 
of His animus into them. I am not sure that 
they are not sentient. But, for the sake of 
conforming to popular prejudice, I will make 
a distinction between the corn and beans and 
the chickens and little pigs. At least they 
have this in common, that both at the begin- 
ning are very new and charming. “When 
will the old hen come off?” is a question that 
the children ask half a dozen times a day. 
I am almost as eager as they are to find out. 
And sure enough, one morning there are 
twelve little fluffy new things peeping out 
from under Mrs. Brown’s feathers, every 
one as fresh as the first brood that came up 
with their clucking mother, asking Adam for 
aname. The new calf makes a great sensa- 
tion on my old farm, and so do the eight 
little white pigs, and the grandchildren can | 
scarcely go to sleep at night lest they should 
miss something wonderfully new. 

Spring does not bring all the new things, 
by any means. Indeed, the year never grows 
old, though we often speak of it in an un- 
complimentary fashion, as the “old year” or 
the “dying year.’ There are quite as many 
new things in July and even in October as in 


[110] 





ALWAYS SOMETHING NEW ON THE OLD FARM 


April or May. The first strawberry, at least 
on my farm, does not usually come until June, 
though this last year I did get a box from my 
ever-bearing vines on the 31st of May, which 
filled me with bucolic, but I hope not sinful, 
pride. The first raspberry comes late in 
June, and the first good blackberry in July. 
It is just as new and quite as delicious as 
though it came in April. 

My land! (if ever this old-fashioned ex- 
pletive is in order, it is now) what a lot of 
new things come along in July and August! 
The first Red June plum belies its name, at 
least where I live, and is not fit to eat until 
July. Then, too, a little later the Abun- 
dance plums almost break the boughs, each 
one as deliciously new as though there were 
no other. Then comes the first Mayflower 
peach, followed by the J. H. Hale, whose 
name, though he himself recently died, lives 
in a thousand orchards. I know of no surer 
way to achieve early immortality than by 
giving your name to a really good peach or 
grape or apple. It will last longer than 
sculptured marble, and when Old Mortality 
must needs go around to dig the moss out of 
the letters of your name on the tombstone, 
a delicious fruit will carry it down untar- 
nished to the third and fourth and, for all 


[111] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


I know, to the thirty-fourth generation. 
Who was the first Mr. Baldwin, and the first 
Ben Davis, and the first Mr. McIntosh, and 
the first Mr. Porter? I suppose some hor- 
ticulturist knows, but a million of us common 
people, without knowing who they were, call 
over these names every summer or autumn. 
This brings me back to my subject, and to 
remember that my first Porter apple I will 
pick in August, but my first Baldwin I will 
let hang on the tree until October, though he 
will scarcely be worth eating until December. 
The same is true of my first McIntosh Red, 
but then his flavor will be as fresh and deli- 
cious as though he were a Summer Harvest 
and ripened in July. 

If we look for them, we shall find almost 
as many new flowers in September and Octo- 
ber as in May and June. Then the asters 
and the goldenrod are in their glory and if 
in May I ruthlessly pick off the blossoms 
from my ever-bearers, I can have fresh straw- 
berries in November. I often wonder, how 
Dame Nature can hold back her children 
so as to give us births almost every month 
in the year. I should think that asters and 
goldenrod and altheas would feel the urge 
of springtime and hasten their blooming, in- 
stead of waiting until many of their compan- 


[112] 


ALWAYS SOMETHING NEW ON THE OLD FARM 


ions are in the sere and yellow leaf. One 
would think they would hear the lilacs and 
the shadbush and the cherry trees in April 
and May crying out, “Come on and come 
out, you lazy things. Don’t you know it is 
spring, and time to bloom?” But they bide 
their time, and know that they will be all the 
more welcome when the riot of spring and 
early summer are past. My Baby Ramblers, 
too, and my Soupert roses and my geraniums 
will bloom until a nipping frost seizes them, 
giving new buds and blossoms every day until 
near December. As for the late Crawfords 
and Greenboros, they are not good to pick 
until the “nipping and eager air” of autumn 
comes, and my Brussels sprouts and parsnips 
like to be frozen a little before they yield me 
their best. 

So the season rolls around ou the old farm, 
and brings a new joy with every day of every 
month. Farming monotonous? I should say 
not. Business is the same old routine, sum- 
mer and winter; school-teaching palls upon 
the most enthusiastic teacher before the sum- 
mer vacation comes; preaching is sometimes 
undeniably dull work in hot weather; but the 
farm is perennial in its joys, unfailing in its 
novelties. Who would not enjoy the daily 
crop of new delights on an old farm? 


[113] 


CHAPTER XIV 
NEXT BEST TO A FARM 


I am sorry for a man who cannot own a 
farm, however circumscribed or sterile its 
acres. Yet I know that some unfortunate 
sons of Adam are so beset behind and before 
by business cares that a real farm seems out 
of the question. There is but one thing for 
such a man to do and that is to become a 
suburbanite. 

I know that it is a vast come-down from 
the wide horizon of even a small farm to 
a ten-rod garden, and it seems small pota- 
toes to measure your land by feet and not 
by acres. But when “needs must’’ holds the 
reins, we must go at his pace. The suburb- 
anite is deeply conscious that there are thorns 
on his rosebush and it is not to be supposed 
that he can escape the ills that afflict our com- 
mon humanity. He is more or less tied to 
trains or electric cars or automobiles, but, 
then, trains and cars and autos are growing 
more and more numerous and extending far- 
ther into the suburbs and thus continually 
lengthening his tether. His friends are said 
to know him by the bundles which his capa- 


[114] 





NEXT BEST TO A FARM 





cious arms bring out of the city every night. 
But if he is the happy possessor of a long, 
green bag, he can stow away in it anything 
from a turkey to a half-pound of pepper- 
mints for the children or a bunch of catnip 
for Tabby, and no one through its opaque 
sides can get a glimpse of the details of his 
domestic economics or economy. Other 
friends declare that the suburbanite is known 
by the anxious and haggard look on his face, 
caused by a perpetual anxiety to catch the 
8:23 train, and by the different colored 
threads on his fingers which his wife has tied 
there “lest he forget’? the prunes or the 
baking powder or the castor oil for the baby. 

But these calumnies may be all set down 
to the envy of the urbanites, or, if there is a 
sediment of truth in them, think how much 
time the suburbanite has, both morning and 
evening, to smooth off the wrinkles in the 
glorious hours of sunrise and sunset and to 
untie and throw away the good wife’s re- 
membrance threads! But to speak with all 
seriousness and out of personal experience, I 
may say that next to a farm, I would choose 
a suburban home for three reasons: for my 
family’s sake, for my body’s sake, and for 
my soul’s sake. 

First, for the family: Think of bringing 


[115] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


up a family of children in the city, when you 
might rear them in the country or at least the 
semi-country! ‘Think of the boys’ having no 
coasting or skating or canoeing or swim- 
ming without going miles to get them! ‘Think 
of the girls’ being obliged to take a train to 
find an hepatica in the springtime, or having 
to take a trolley ride even to see a dandelion! 
Think of a dogless, henless home, and per- 
haps even.a catless home! To be sure, one 
can own a cat or even a dog in the city, but 
it is a poor circumscribed, joyless existence 
that old Tray must live there, and only a 
spoiled and petted lap-dog can be happy 
when continually in sight of brick walls and 
sidewalks. 

But though cats and dogs are not impos- 
- sible in the city, guinea pigs and rabbits and 
ducks and hens, to say nothing of turkeys and 
peacocks, are quite out of the question. 
There is no such humanizer of boy nature as 
pets. The lad who has a tame squirrel that 
will eat out of his hand, a dog that will tum- 
ble all over himself and split his throat with 
glad barks when his young master proposes 
a walk, or a colt that will come whinnying at 
his call, will never grow up to be a cruel bully. 

And hens! What a vast education a boy 
can find in a flock of these feathered bipeds! 


[116] 


NEXT BEST TO A FARM 


They teach him mathematics, economics, hy- 
gienics, and the rudiments of I do not know 
how many other sciences. “How much will 
seventeen eggs at sixty-five cents a dozen come 
to?’ If Father does pay the bill, the young 
hen fancier must reckon up his profits every 
week, and find out at the end of the month 
the difference between the cost of a bushel 
of shorts and ten quarts of second-grade 
wheat, on the debit side, and five and one- 
third dozen eggs on the credit side. Then 
there is the study of the fascinating hen 
magazine, and the delightful possibilities of 
“200 eggs a year per hen,” and the argu- 
ments for and against dry feeding and a hot 
mash, cut alfalfa, grits, and charcoal—all 
of which are an education in themselves. If 
a duck pond can be added to the suburban 
estate, however small it is, the fascination is 
almost doubled. But even in the tiniest there 
is room for a couple of rabbits and a few 
bantams. 

The snow fort in the winter, the flower 
garden in the spring, the swimming pool in 
the summer, the chestnut trees in the au- 
tumn—only the suburban boy or the country 
boy can know what they mean, with all their 
manifold and exhaustless charms. 

But I have said that if I could not have a 


[117] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


farm I would choose a suburban home for 
my own sake as well as for my family. The 
hardest thing for a professional man to do is 
to keep in such good physical condition that 
he won’t be a nuisance to himself and his 
friends. Dyspepsia is another name often 
for peevishness, and nervousness is a synonym 
for all-round misery. Surely a man who can 
breathe fresh country air at least fourteen 
hours out of the twenty-four, who can work 
in a garden and walk in the fields, has a bet- 
ter chance to discipline his stomach and his 
nerves than his all-the-year-’round city neigh- 
bor. Better than all the setting-up exercises 
in the world, valuable as they are, or the 
physical culture fads which one begins upon 
so bravely and which usually ‘“‘peter out” so 
soon, is the physical culture which you do not 
know you are getting when you are pruning 
your grapes, and tying up your clematis vine, 
and burying your tulip bulbs in the mellow 
brown soil of spring. 

Besides this, a suburbanite usually lives 
within walking distance of some golf-links, 
and when his small garden is cared for he can 
shoulder his clubs and chase the elusive ball 
over hill and dale, until, thoroughly tired 
and thoroughly at peace with the world, he 
is called home by the dinner bell. If one has 


[118] 


NEXT BEST TO A FARM 


no taste or time or money for golf, a very 
small suburban estate contains endless possi- 
bilities for exercise. “The front lawn alone 
is enough to keep a man in good condition if 
he looks after it himself. A multi-million- 
aire in one of our western cities, who was 
often seen pushing his lawnmower over his 
half-acre, was asked why he did not hire a 
man to cut the grass. ‘Can I hire a man 
to sweat for me?” was his gruff but all-suff- 
cient reply. ‘To be sure, on many soils a lawn 
is an expensive luxury, and I sympathize with 
the suburbanite who declared at last, after 
many unsuccessful attempts at grass, that he 
had decided it would be cheaper to carpet his 
front lawn with Turkish rugs. Yet if he had 
reckoned the healthy perspiration which the 
care of the lawn had started, there would 
have been a large balance in favor of nature’s 
green rug. 

But I have said that considerations of soul 
health also would influence me in choosing 
a suburban rather than a city home. Soul 
health, after all, is the most imperative. 
Though a man can possibly be a saint in the 
city, he has a better chance of sainthood, in 
my opinion, in the country. Some men can 
see God in bricks and mortar, in artificial 
parks and fountains that can be turned on 


[119] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


and off with a stop-cock, but most men can 
see Him more clearly in hill and valley and 
running brook. There are sermons in stones, 
but they can be read more easily before the 
stones are built into walls. A noble grove 
of pines is more apt to remind me of their 
Maker than is a skyscraper, even if the stones 
and brick clay of which it is built did come 
originally from God’s country. To pluck 
a humble little pansy that I have seen grow 
from a seed that I have planted and watered 
and watched reminds me more of the Giver 
of all good than does the most elaborate 
decoration of a gilded palace. To see things 
grow, just to see things grow, seems to make 
the soul grow with them. ‘The expanding 
maple leaf in the spring, the tasseled chestnut 
in the early summer, the gorgeous gladiolus 
in the fall, the Mayflower bud waiting under 
the leaves through the long winter, each re- 
membering his appointed season, remind one 
throughout every day of the round year that 
‘‘the hand that made them is divine.” How- 
ever tiny the leaf or flower, it tells the same 
story. 


‘Flower in the crannied wall, 
I pluck you out of the crannies, 
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
Little flower—but if I could understand 


[120] 


NEXT BEST TO A FARM 


What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
I should know what God and man is.”’ 


I shall only add to the suburbanite homily 
a word about the quiet mornings and peace- 
ful evenings of the country. The midday may 
be full of bustle and confusion, worry, and 
possibly heartache, but the morning and eve- 
ning hours frame in the day with a beautiful 
border that seems to make the whole day 
lovely. The cares of the working hours slip 
away, and the soul is bathed in peace when 
the sun goes down, and when he rises again 
one can begin the new day with a quiet hour 
—even if the ‘“‘hour”’ is only fifteen minutes 
long—of meditation and inbreathing and 
soul-expansion. ‘This is not impossible, to be 
sure, in the city, but how much more fragrant 
is the hour in the country on a summer’s 
morning, as one whispers to himself Mrs. 
Stowe’s beautiful lines, before he goes to the 
dust and toil of the city: 


“Still, still with Thee, when purple morning 
breaketh, 
When the bird waketh, and the shadows 
flee; 
Fairer than morning, lovelier than daylight, 
Dawns the sweet consciousness, I am with 
hee: 


[121] 


CHAPTER XV 
CAN A HORSE LAUGH? 


‘It’s enough to make a horse laugh,” said 
my neighbor Jenkins to me the other day, 
rehearsing a story that he considered excru- 
ciatingly funny. Whatever the merits of the 
story, it implied an undeserved reflection on 
the sense of humor of old Billy, who was de- 
murely grazing nearby but just out of hear- 
ing. How does Jackson know that Billy does 
not understand a joke unless it be a particu- 
larly obvious and uproarious one? Bring 
him a peck of oats, and if he doesn’t laugh 
when he sees you coming with them, I don’t 
know what a horse laugh 1s, and anyone that 
can laugh must have a sense of humor, unless 
it is a sardonic, Mephistophelean chuckle in 
which I am sure honest Billy never indulges. 
I have already written of some of the signs 
of fun I find on the old farm, but the sub- 
ject is so prolific it deserves another chapter. 

I wish that the indefatigable gentleman 
who spent some weeks in a monkeys’ cage 
learning the simian language had recorded 
a monkey’s skit on the men and women out- 


[122] 





CAN A HORSE LAUGH? 





side his cage, or even an apean limerick. I 
am confident these Darwinian cousins of ours 
have their jokes. Anyone who has watched 
them in a big banyan tree in India, gently 
spanking their little ones but with a great 
show of force, or sidling up to another 
monkey on a precarious limb and then giving 
him a sly push that sends him off the branch, 
compelling him to take a flying leap, knows 
how fond they are of practical jokes, at least. 

‘TIsn’t he stuck on himself!” said a small 
boy, as we were watching the antics of some 
monkeys in the Zoo, one of whom was intently 
gazing at his face in a mirror and making all 
sorts of grimaces, which he evidently en- 
joyed. My opinion, however, was more com- 
plimentary, for I attributed his facial con- 
tortions not to personal conceit but to that 
very human sense of the ridiculous that makes 
the contorting mirrors at the circus the most 
popular of all the sideshows. What shrieks 
of laughter the fat man provokes when he 
sees himself and others see him as a lean 
and hungry Cassius, a veritable beanpole of 
aman. The tall, thin man equally amuses 
himself and all his friends when the convex 
glass shows that he has suddenly become ro- 
tund enough for a dime museum. So the 
monkey in the Zoo was enjoying himself in 


[123] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


the same way, only he was making the dis- 
tortions for himself—another proof, it will 
be seen, of our cousinship. 

But I set out not to write of humor in the 
monkeys’ cage, which is evident enough, but 
of humor on the old farm, which is just as 
realif not so boisterous. There is the big sow, 
for instance. She is about as unpromising 
a subject as one could pick out. Yet a year 
ago, when she weighed only ten pounds, she 
enjoyed romping and playing with her little 
brothers and sisters, putting up a mock fight, 
and having a race with them all for her 
mother’s “‘bosom,’’ as Portuguese John eu- 
phoniously calls the porcine maternal font. 
Now, to be sure, with her ample girth, her 
five hundred pounds of ham and spareribs 
to carry around, and family cares involved 
in rearing her own thirteen little white darl- 
ings, she cannot express her enjoyment in the 
same frisky way, but I am mistaken if there 
is not something more than contentment in 
her face when after rolling in the mud she 
stretches herself at full length in the sun and 
invites her children to their fourth midday 
meal. If the captious critic asserts that en- 
joyment and good spirits are no proof of a 
sense of humor, I defy him to prove that 
Mrs. Genus Sus has no such sense. ‘The 


[124] 


CAN A HORSE LAUGH? 


burden of proof lies with him, since it is cer- 
tainly true that good humor and humor are 
at least closely allied in the Genus Homo. 

It is interesting to note that all young 
things on the old farm seem to have the 
‘saving sense.’ An old hen is apparently 
as humorless as she is stupid. I have already 
dilated on this lack in her mentality, but she 
is worth another line. She is so intent on 
getting every tidbit away from her sister hens 
and enjoying it all by herself, that she has no 
more time for fun than for the other ameni- 
ties of life. Her eagerness to get there first 
and get the best seems to addle her brains, 
just as selfish miserliness dulls the wits of 
humans. When she sees her companions 
being fed, though the door to the hen-yard is 
wide open, she will strive frantically to break 
through the wires which have foiled her a 
hundred times in the past and will race down 
and back a score of laps, instead of seeking 
the open door which she must know perfectly 
well is there, if she would only stop and 
think. ‘Thus greediness overreaches itself, 
and the profiteer who would hog all the best 
things finds a moral wire fence which he 
cannot pass between himself and his goal of 
happiness. 

But with small chickens, as with children, 


[125] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


for the most part it is different. They are 
selfish, to be sure, but they are willing others 
should have their share if they can get it, 
and if I am not very much mistaken my two 
little cockerels have a genuine sense of humor 
when they bristle up, look daggers at each 
other, ruffle their feather boas for a minute, 
and then suddenly drop their apparent Hun- 
nish frightfulness and go to picking at a spear 
of sorrel, as-though they had always been the 
best friends in the world. I am sure this 
is part of their fun, and no real enmity is 
in their hearts. ‘They are just playing that 
they are on opposite sides of the Piave. And 
later, when one of the cockerels mounts a pile 
of seaweed, which John is storing up for next 
season's potato crop, and utters his first 
challenge in a cracked and squeaky voice, he 
is only shouting like other boys of his age, 


‘T’m king of the castle, 
And you’re the rogue and the rascal.” 


He knows that it is a joke, and that he is 
sure to be deposed from his castle very soon. 

My cow is a solemn creature as I have 
before opined. No glint of humor lights 
her meditative eye as she chews her cud, 
and when I approach her with a few carrots 


[126] 


CAN A HORSE LAUGH? 


she is eager enough, but betrays no spark 
of genial fun or even gratitude in her eager- 
ness. But how different when she was a 
bossy six years ago! She had not been on 
‘this goodly frame, the earth,” twenty-four 
hours before she began to kick up her awk- 
ward, untried heels for a frolic, and in a 
month she could haul the desperately resist- 
ing hired man all over the place when she 
did not want to follow his lead. 

The old cat, too, is staid as an eight-day 
clock and, even with cream on her whiskers, 
tries to persuade you by her demureness that 
she hasn’t been near the milk pan. Possibly, 
however, that is a sly species of humor for 
which I had never given her credit. But 
when she was a kitten her own tail was so 
amusing that she would chase it for half an 
hour at a time, and every ball of twine con- 
tained unlimited possibilities of fun. So, 
alas! it is with most of us. We forget as we 
grow older that there is a rainbow in every 
bubble if we would but look for it, and we 
take our pleasures more and more seriously. 
Of all the animals on my farm my dogs 
retain their youthful good humor the longest. 
They are of the St. Bernard strain, and 
Beauty, though several times a_ prolific 
mother, will play with her grown-up son, 


[127] 


‘THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


Jack, as though her years were the same as 
his. In their elephantine way they will knock 
each other over and playfully bite each 
other’s ears, and lock their teeth into each 
other’s jaws, yet never draw a drop of 
blood or provoke so much as an angry yelp. 

A dog’s humor depends largely upon his 
breed. Pure St. Bernards are too stately 
and serious to see the funny side of life, and 
my dogs get their fun from some alien strain. 
The genuine St. Bernard is always looking 
for an exhausted wayfarer and should never 
go out without a little keg of prohibition cor- 
dial around his neck. The Dachshund, too, 
is a solemn as well as an absurd little beast: 
‘long and low like a bench,” as Mark Twain 
said, ‘‘to be continued in our next.’ I never 
saw a Dachshund smile. Why should a Hun 
dog smile, anyway? ‘The Boston Terrier is 
too conceited to be humorous. The tighter 
his tail is screwed up, and the more sinister 
the snarl on his undershot jaw, the more he 
thinks of himself. He will hardly speak to 
any dog off Beacon Hill. 

Of all the dogs of my acquaintance the 
collie has the truest sense of humor. Whether 
it is the pawky Scotch humor of his forbears 
I am not certain. I do not think it is, how- 
ever, for since he came to America, it is too 


[128] 


CAN A HORSE LAUGH? 


outspoken and expressive. He is never con- 
tented to say of a meaty bone, “It might be 
waur.’ If ever a dog smiled with genuine 
mirth and good feeling, it was old Sandy 
when I used to come home from a long jour- 
ney. As plain as voice and eyes and tail 
could say it, he would tease, ‘Now let us 
have a little romp, or go down town to- 
gether.” 

But humor and good humor are by no 
means confined to the domestic animals. 
Even the tame wild birds on the old farm 
show that they often see the lighter side of 
life, in spite of their usual absorption in 
picking up a living. In the spring they are’ 
almost all eager for an amorous frolic, as 
they chase each other from limb to limb and 
through the air; and though the cares of 
housebuilding and family rearing curb their 
spirits somewhat, I have observed that they 
indulge in more than one innocent joke on 
each other. 

Not that I think the cowbird’s joke is in- 
nocent, when she lays one of her big eggs in 
the box I put up for the bluebirds, and 
which they had already preempted. It is 
a dirty, low joke at the best, but I can 
imagine the dusky cowbird chuckling to her- 
self as she says, ‘“Won’t dainty Mrs. Blue 


[129] 





THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


be surprised when she finds she has an ugly 
duckling in her family?” I enjoy much bet- 
ter the fun of the kingbird when he dashes 
off after a crow ten times his size, jumps on 
his ancestral foe, gives him two or three 
sharp pecks, and soars away before old 
Corvus can turn around. That is genuine 
and humorous retribution, for the crow de- 
serves all that is coming to him. And yet 
Corvus himself is not destitute of humor 
when he sits on the scarecrow’s rakish cap 
and flies down every now and then for an- 
other kernel, only to return to the observa- 
tion tower which someone has kindly put up 
for him. 

You would suspect from the very note that 
gives him his name that Bob White was a 
cheery little fellow, with a streak of fun in 
him, and when you try to find him in the 
weeds and long grass you are the more sure 
of it, for his “bob white” is most elusive, as 
though he were playing a game of hide and 
seek with you. When you are confident you 
have located him, he is sure to be somewhere 
else, and his cheerful “I spy” lures you on 
for another fruitless chase. If by any chance 
you run across Mrs. White and her little 
Bobs are near, she will droop one wing until 
you are sure that it is broken and you can 


[130] 


CAN A HORSE LAUGH? 


catch her. But she will keep just out of your 
reach until you are far enough away from 
her nest, when she will scurry away on both 
wings which are really as sound as they ever 
were. I know that the solemn ornithologist 
will assure you that it is only mother love . 
and fear for their young that move the quail 
and other birds to such deceit, but I feel quite 
confident that when well out of harm’s way 
and the family is reunited, they all chuckle 
over it, and the mother bird says, “‘Didn’t I 
fool that fellow nicely? ‘These great gawky 
folks are so easily taken in.”’ 

The bluejay has a raucous kind of humor, 
like a scolding fishwife in whose Billingsgate, 
nevertheless, there is something sharp and 
funny. I imagine he is up in the latest bird 
slang, and if any of the birds talk back he can 
give them much better than they send. 

The English sparrow is of all God’s crea- 
tures so self-centered and selfish that I look 
for no gleam of humor in her practical, busi- 
nesslike eye. “Everyone for herself and the 
hawk take the hindmost,” is apparently her 
motto. Even her nest, which I took joy in 
robbing, shows no signs of nice adjustment, 
as though she said, “I'll trouble myself just 
as little as possible for my dratted young 
ones,’ and so she huddles together some 


[131] 





THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


sticks and straws and calls it a nest, while 
her cousin, the chipping sparrow, nearby, 
lines hers beautifully with moss and horse- 
hair. How can one look for any of the sweet 
amenities of life in such a bird! 

The chickadee has a pleasant, loquacious 
humor all his own. Especially in the winter, 
when other birds are scarce, he will don his 
best black and white clothes, and come more 
than halfway to meet you and cry out cheer- 
ily, “Chick-a-dee-dee-dee,”’ which, being in- 
terpreted, means, ‘‘Here I am, you see, see, 
see.” As you walk along the well-worn path, 
he keeps up with you in the small trees just 
about even with your head, but flying in and 
out, and perching just long enough as you 
go by to say again, ‘‘Chick-a-dee-dee-dee, 
chick-a-dee-dee-dee. Now you see me and 
now you don’t, see, see, see.’ Dear little 
fellow, the snappiest cold weather and the 
iciest twigs do not seem to curb his spirits! 
Would that I could bear the cold blasts of | 
adversity as cheerfully! 

Of all my door-yard neighbors this last 
summer the tree swallows seemed to me the 
most sociable and the most delicate in their 
humorous view of life. I had early in the 
spring put up several nesting-boxes for them, 
which they accepted without any ifs or buts. 


[132] 





CAN A HORSE LAUGH ? 





The bluebirds looked at the boxes suspi- 
ciously, and for a long time debated whether 
to accept my hospitality or not. The robins 
and chickadees and sparrows of various 
kinds declined with thanks and said, ‘‘We 
prefer to build our own.’”’ But the tree 
swallows said at once, ‘‘With pleasure,” and 
started their homes in the most conspicuous 
boxes they could find and those nearest the 
house. | 
During the period of incubation, in whic 

I think father and mother both took part, 
they showed the greatest interest in all the 
members of the human family. We could 
scarcely go out of the front door but the 
bird on the nearest nest would stick his or 
her beautiful, glossy, green head out of the 
little hole in the nesting-box, and watch every 
movement with beady, black eyes that seemed 
to shine with merriment. When we had 
visitors, each in turn would show off with 
the greatest alacrity, flying off, circling 
around the tree half a dozen times, darting 
in again at the rate of fifty miles an hour, 
but never missing the tiny hole by a hair. 
Then he—I use the masculine gender as em- 
bracing the feminine—would turn around, 
stick out his head, and with his twinkling eyes 
would seem to say, ‘‘Isn’t that going some? 


[133] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


Thank you for making my doorway so nar- 
row that no crow or bluejay or snake or 
weasel can get in, while I can make it even 
when going at express speed.’”’ When the 
young ones left the shell the parents had 
little time for conversation, but every three 
minutes from purple morn to dewy eve one 
or the other would bring an insect to the 
hungry little maws, while they darted in and 
out like lightning, always getting their prey, 
like true sportsmen, upon the wing. 

An acute observer could doubtless discover 
many more indications of humor among the 
beasts of the field and the fowl of the air, 
but even a layman without an opera glass 
and with a very limited use of his imagination 
can see enough such signs to make him feel a 
delightful sense of kinship with all created 
things. A sense of humor is one of the 
‘bonds of perfectness.”” No one can hate or 
despise a fellow-being with whom he shares 
a good quip of any kind. 

No wonder St. Anthony preached to the 
fishes at Rimini when the people would not 
listen to his sermons, and St. Francis, we 
know, preached to the birds whenever he got 
a chance. These blessed saints are not 
usually classed with Mark Twain and Arte- 
mus Ward, but they knew how to tell the 


[134] 





CAN A HORSE LAUGH? 


people of their day that even a fish or a bird 
was a better listener than they, and I con- 
sider that first-class ministerial humor. 

But I hear Beauty and Jack barking at the 
kitchen door, and they plainly say, “Have 
done with all that humorous nonsense and 
give us our afternoon dog biscuits.”’ 


[135] 


CHAPTER XVI 


EVER-BEARERS AND EVER-BLOOM- 
ERS 


I would, if properly I could, spare my 
readers the dictum of Dean Swift about 
the worth of the man who made two blades 
of grass to grow where but one grew before, 
but it gives me the opportunity to say that if 
there is truth in that overworked aphorism, 
then we should call down still larger bless- 
ings on the head of the man who induced 
a strawberry bed to bear for five months 
in the year instead of one, and a rose garden 
to bloom from frost to frost, instead of for 
one brief fortnight in a month, when scores 
of other plants are competing with the roses 
for first prize. Yet these strawberries and 
roses are both well established horticultural 
wonders of the day. I picked the first 
mess—most unhappy word to use in this 
connection, I admit—of strawberries on the 
last day of May, and the last one on the 
second day of November, and in the inter- 
calary months had a great many dishes of 
‘doubtless the best berry God ever made,” if 
we accept Izaak Walton’s judgment. The 


[136] 


EVER-BEARERS AND EVER-BLOOMERS 


baby ramblers that line either side of the 
brick walk leading to the front door of the 
farmhouse began to bloom in June and found 
it very hard to leave off blooming in De- 
cember. 

Who would not throw up his hat for such 
berries and such roses? ‘They take up no 
more room in my few precious acres, they 
require no more attention, and they are even 
hardier than their forbears, who gave my 
forbears only a few scanty days or weeks 
of pleasure. How did you bring this about, 
Mr. Plant Wizard? Is your name Bur- 
bank or just plain John Smith or George 
Jones? I wish I knew your name and ad- 
dress, for I would send you a letter of 
thanks or dedicate my next book to you— 
not that I consider that an adequate honor, 
but what else has a poor author to offer? 

Your creations have done more for me 
than to provide me with unlimited straw- 
berry cake and countless bouquets—they 
have caused me to look within and to confess 
that I am neither an ever-bloomer nor an 
ever-bearer. If one does not indulge in it 
too freely, introspection is as good for the 
soul as confession, whose virtues have so 
long been lauded. Yet I gain some comfort 
from the fact that the ‘‘ccommon or garden’”’ 


[137] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


strawberry is well worth raising, and the 
old-fashioned tea rose which lives its little 
life and fades so soon does brighten my gar- 
den most wondrously while it lasts. 

Of this also J am reminded, that even my 
ever-bearers are not equally prolific during 
all the bearing season. If I would have an 
abundance in September, I must pick off the 
blossoms of early May. It seems a cruel 
thing to do, and though I nerved myself to 
sacrifice a whole row of blossoms, I kept 
saying to myself, “I am not simply picking 
off and throwing away a lot of little incon- 
spicuous white flowers, I am picking off 
future strawberries. [here goes a whole 
saucerful of delicious ruby red berries. ‘There 
goes a strawberry cake. ‘There goes the best 
part of a fruit salad.” However, I cour- 
ageously kept on to the end of the row, and 
yet I could not altogether discourage those 
wonderful plants, for they insisted on putting 
forth new blossoms and bearing a goodly 
number of berries in June, but more in Au- 
gust, and still more in September. So, Mr. 
Plant Wizard, you cannot altogether annul 
the laws of nature. She will insist on taking 
a little rest. She will not let even one of your 
strawberry plants work twenty-four hours a 
day and thirty-one days a month. 


[138] 


EVER-BEARERS AND EVER-BLOOMERS 


On one of my Baby Ramblers—I shall 
spell my baby with capitals this time, how- 
ever the proofreader may rave—I counted 
five hundred and thirty-eight buds and blos- 
soms at one time, and the bush was not too 
large for a flower-pot on the center table, 
had I chosen to bring it indoors. Yet I 
noticed that even this brave plant, ambitious 
to outdo all its companions in the row, looked 
wan and exhausted after this, and dwindled 
away to a meager score of blossoms for a 
while before it really gathered strength for 
a new effort. 

So it is in the human flower garden. No 
man is equally brilliant and intellectually 
prolific at all times. “The most noted au- 
thors occasionally have a fallow-ground year, 
and those whose books have the greatest 
reputation sometimes disappoint their pub- 
lishers and the public. Indeed, it is scarcely 
safe for an author to strike twelve the first 
time, lest the next hour struck should prove 
to be one. Do you remember Frank Stock- 
ton’s story, ‘“His Deceased Wife’s Sister’? 
The author’s first novel was so entrancing, 
so extraordinarily good, that for many years 
he could never equal it. The publishers all 
refused his subsequent stories, on the ground 
that they were inferior to “His Deceased 


[139] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


Wife’s Sister.” ‘They said the public ex- 
pected something equally brilliant, and that 
his reputation would suffer should they pub- 
lish anything less good. For a time the poor 
author, unable to get anything published, 
pined and almost starved, but finally suc- 
ceeded in getting some good, though second- 
rate, stories accepted and was again acquir- 
ing a fair measure of prosperity. Again he 
wrote a novel that in his opinion was quite 
as good as the first. In this his intimate 
friends agreed with him, and his publisher 
as well, who offered him a large price, but 
he would not risk its publication lest once 
more he should be involved in a like disaster. 
So one dark night he took it out into the 
middle of a lake, tied a big stone to the 
manuscript and sunk it to the bottom. So 
let us of mediocre worth take comfort that 
our fortune and happiness are never thus 
imperiled. 

There is some warrant for the assertion 
that ‘‘good poets, like good people, die 
young’ when we remember Thomas Chat- 
terton, “the marvelous boy who perished in 
his pride,” and by his own hand. He had 
written some beautiful poems and had hoaxed 
all the literary antiquarians of England with 
his pretended discovery of ancient manu- 


[140] 


EVER-BEARERS AND EVER-BLOOMERS 


scripts. Some saner poets died before they 
had rounded out their first quarter of a cen- 
tury, like Henry Kirk White, whose hymns 
we still sing, Richard Gall and Robert 
Nicholl, two Scotch poets of great promise, 
and chief of all John Keats, who died of 
consumption at twenty-five. It was said that 
his decline was brought on by the rough 
handling that his poems received at the hands 
of the reviewers. Byron, for one, called 
them “the driveling idiotism of a manikin,”’ 
and when Keats died, perpetrated these cruel 
lines concerning his literary sensitiveness: 


‘Tis strange the mind, that very fiery par- 
ticle, 
Should let itself be snuffed out by an ar- 
ticle.” 


Alas, the late war has been responsible 
for the early death of several young poets 
whose swan songs were uttered to the ac- 
companiment of bursting shell and booming 
guns. 

Still, all these instances of the early de- 
mise of the gifted do not make out a strong 
case for the superiority of poets who die 
young, or by analogy for roses that will 
bloom and die in a week. I admit the beauty 
and charm of both, but I still prefer the 


[141] 


THE GOSPEL OF OUT OF DOORS 


Tennysons and Wordsworths and Longfel- 
lows, the Holmeses and Lowells and Bryants 
and Whittiers, who wrote until old age 
palsied their hands, and I prefer my ram- 
blers and my Souperts that blossom all sum- 
mer to the most exquisite creation of my 
garden which today is and tomorrow is cast 
into the oven—or fireplace. It always seemed 
to me a sad waste of nature’s energies to 
spend a hundred years in bringing a century 
plant to bloom and then to let the precious 
product die in a night. 

To sum up the lesson of my ever bearers 
and ever bloomers—they teach me, though 
I said at the beginning I cannot claim to 
belong to either class, that if I would bear 
any fruit in old age, if I would be even mod- 
erately “fat and flourishing,’ I must con- 
serve my resources. If I would have an 
abundance of strawberries in September, I 
must be chary of their fruit in June. If I 
would have even a few strawberries and a 
few roses on the table all summer, I must 
not make too large drafts on the vitality of 
my plants in their early days. A man may 
have “‘a short life and a merry one,” but if 
merriment stands in his mind for dissipation, 
he cannot have both. So, whatever energies 
we dissipate in our youth, we lose for old age. 


[142] 


EVER-BEARERS AND EVER-BLOOMERS 


I always suspect the wisdom and _ lasting 
worth of the “‘boy preachers,” and the early 
prodigies of intellectual might are often 
eclipsed before they reach their noonday. 
Here is a happy thought with which to 
end my book: What does immortality mean 
if it does not mean bloom and fruit in the 
far regions beyond this little world? After 
all, my strawberries and roses are not the 
best symbols of constant blooming and bear- 
ing but my sturdy apple-trees, which for fifty 
years have blossomed every spring and borne 
fruit every autumn and have never altogether 
disappointed their owners. Yes, I would 
covet the blessing which the writer of the 
first Psalm bestowed upon the man whose 
‘delight is in the law of the Lord,” for he 
shall be ‘‘like a tree planted by the rivers of 
water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his 
season; his leaf also shall not wither; and 
whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.” 


[143] 


























